heal thyself
by upsidedownbutterfly
Summary: An AU in which Yuri is a fourth-year emergency medicine resident, and Otabek is the hospital's new trauma attending. They shout a bit at each other, but mostly they fall in love.
1. chapter one

"Cops are bringing in a GSW," Mickey the charge nurse announces, setting down the phone he had picked up a moment before. "Five minutes out."

Yuri's eyes flick down to the bottom right of his computer screen. He immediately groans. It's six twenty-three in the morning, meaning there's less than an hour left in his shift. Of course _now_ he's getting the fucking gunshot wound. He's managed to get through the last eleven hours without having to deal with a single real trauma – he's not going to count the GOMER found down at his nursing home and the two drunk fall-and-go-booms – and now, with thirty-seven minutes left in his shift, the fine officers of the law are about to dump a GSW into his metaphorical lap. Who the fuck shoots someone before breakfast anyway?

 _Let it be a bullshit graze wound_ , he thinks to himself. Then maybe he'd have at least a slim chance of actually leaving his shift on time. Of course with his luck, it'll probably be a trauma code instead, and he'll end up stuck here for hours dealing with death certificates and calls to the medical examiner's office.

His attending, Viktor, is already asking the clerk to call a level two trauma alert so Yuri turns to Guang Hong, the third-year resident currently seated to his right, and jerks his head towards the trauma bay. "Let's get set up," he says.

A blast of cold air hits him as the trauma bay doors swing open, and Yuri steps inside. It's always freezing in the bay. Well, actually there had been that one week last year when the hospital administration in all their infinite wisdom had turned the thermostat way up, but they had quickly reconsidered the merits of that act when Seung Gil, one of the surgeons, threatened to start showing up to traumas in his underwear. Before Yuri are the three trauma beds, separated from each other by lead-lined dividers and each equipped with their own individual set of resuscitation equipment. Yuuri, the trauma nurse tonight, is already situating himself in front of the middle bed so Yuri doesn't bother asking which one they'll be using.

Yuuri looks up from arranging his IV supplies and smiles at Yuri. Yuri just scowls in response. Yuri actually does like Yuuri well-enough, especially now that the nurse has gotten over his initial tendency to panic the moment shit started hitting the fan. He's seen him do some frankly beautiful work with patients. It's just that his overly affectionate nature grates on Yuri. Also there's his insistence on calling Yuri by the nickname "Yurio", which Yuri earned intern year and has despised ever since. He's a fourth-year now. Is it really too much to ask for his co-workers to even pretend to respect him? He's not saying anyone has to call him _Dr. Plisetsky_ , but his actual first name would be nice.

Yuri sets about pulling a pair of chest tube trays off the back shelf and placing them on the tables situated on either side of the bed. Next to each, he lays a 10-blade scalpel. Hopefully, he won't need them, but he'd rather be prepared. Guang Hong, similarly, is going through the airway equipment, checking the light on the laryngoscope and testing the balloon on the endotracheal tube. As they make their preparations, the rest of the team begins trickling in.

First in is Viktor, who all but waltzes through the trauma bay doors and promptly begins making kissy faces at his husband, Yuuri. Yuri rolls his eyes. The man is patently ridiculous. As an intern, Yuri used to wonder how he'd even made it through medical school let alone through an emergency medicine residency. Then he watched him cric an angioedema patient in thirty seconds flat. Viktor may be ridiculous, but he's also a scary-good doctor.

"You've got this, Yurio," Viktor sing-songs. "It's all you tonight!" Typical Viktor. Yuri still doesn't understand why Viktor chose to adopt him as his pet resident, but he did. As a result, he has been nothing but relentlessly and nauseatingly encouraging since Yuri's intern year.

"Don't call me that," Yuri growls in response. He does, however, appreciate the affirmation that he'll be the one running this trauma resuscitation.

After Viktor arrives Emil, the radiology technician, holding his x-ray plate, and then two women from blood bank, whose names Yuri doesn't know, with their cooler of type O blood. All three take up their usual place off to the side of the immediate resuscitation area. After the women comes Sara, one of the respiratory therapists, who joins Guang Hong in standing at the head of the bed.

Just when Yuri is starting to worry that the patient will beat them to the bay, the trauma surgery team finally starts to arrive. Leo is the trauma chief tonight, which Yuri can't complain about. He finds Leo quite tolerable by surgeon standards. Accompanying Leo is a woman Yuri doesn't recognized but assumes is the trauma intern based on her harried expression and the fact that she has so many pagers clipped around her waist that Yuri honestly can't fathom how her scrub pants haven't fallen down. He ignores the intern, but greets Leo with a nod.

"Who's your attending tonight?" Yuri asks Leo as they both go about donning gloves and shrugging the bright blue protective plastic gowns over their scrubs.

Leo responds with a one-shouldered shrug. "Some new guy named Otabek Altin. Fresh out of fellowship," he says. Ah, the hazard of July in a teaching hospital: a thousand and one new faces, all with names to learn and practice patterns to get used to.

"He any good?" Yuri queries, and Leo just shrugs once more.

"He seems fine, I guess. This is the first time I'm working with him." Leo pauses as the trauma bay doors open once more. Then he inclines his head towards the man who's just entered and adds, "But judge for yourself."

The patient will be arriving any second, but Yuri can't help but spare a moment to give this Otabek Altin a once over. He's short – shorter even than Yuri, who is admittedly not exactly a bastion of height – but built enough under his blue surgical scrubs that Yuri's first thought (after a wholly involuntary _damn_ ) is _wannabe orthopod_. His hair is dark and cut in the same stupid style as Yuri's least favorite co-resident, JJ, which certainly isn't winning him any points from Yuri.

The most striking thing about him, however, is his expression, or rather, his complete lack of one. Yuri watches him glance around the trauma bay, taking in the set-up and various assembled team members, all while wearing the same look of complete and utter impassivity. Even when his gaze makes its way to Yuri, who is obviously and unsubtly sizing him up, his expression remains totally blank.

 _What's with you, asshole?_ Yuri almost says, because he is nothing if not a master of first impressions. Something in his face must give his intent away. That, or after four years now, Viktor just knows him well enough to assume. Either way, Yuri feels a sharp jab of an elbow in his left ribs, and decides for once in his life to bite his tongue.

Well, sort of, because while he may not end up calling the new trauma attending an asshole, he does say, "You know we run the traumas until they leave the ED, right?"

Of course, Yuri would argue, that is actually vital to establish. The last thing he needs is some fancy trauma surgeon fresh out of some fancy trauma surgery fellowship thinking that he's calling the shots. In other hospitals, maybe, but not in this one. Here, surgery can have the patient in the operating room. In the bay, they belong to emergency medicine, which means that tonight, they belong to Yuri.

Altin just stares back at him with that same blank expression he's been wearing since he first stepped into the bay and doesn't respond. Yuri can feel his irritation rising. He's about half a second from just saying "fuck it" and laying into him, Viktor and his pointy elbows be damned, when his attention is caught by a sudden commotion beyond the trauma bay doors. A moment later, they fly open once more to reveal two officers in uniform supporting a young man, probably in his early twenties by the look of him, between them. All three are covered in blood, but only the man in the middle has the pale, glassy-eyed, diaphoretic look of a trauma patient.

"He has a left chest wound!" Mickey announces from half a step behind the trio.

"Left-sided chest tube, now!" Yuri snaps, jabbing a finger at the nameless trauma intern. Initially, she just stares at him wide-eyed, and Yuri hates July, with its inevitable crop of new and totally useless interns, furiously. Never mind that he used to be one of them. Then Leo's there, grabbing the intern by the shoulder and shoving her towards the chest tube tray that Yuri had prepared earlier.

The two officers deposit the trauma patient onto the stretcher, and Yuri allows himself a moment to survey the scene. Yuuri has already slammed an IV into the patient faster than Yuri would have thought possible – "16 gauge, right antecubital fossa!" – and is currently getting the patient on the cardiac monitor while Mickey finishes cutting his clothes off. Leo and his intern have the chest tube tray open on the patient's left and are in the process of swapping out their gloves for sterile ones.

Yuri takes a step forward so he's standing directly at the foot of the stretcher. He can still feel Viktor's silent supportive presence off his left shoulder. He looks up at the head of the bed and meets Guang Hong's eyes as he pulls his stethoscope out of his ears.

"Airway intact," Guang Hong announces, starting his primary survey. "Absent breath sounds on the left."

 _No shit,_ Yuri thinks glancing at the hole in the patient's chest, easily visible now that Mickey's cut his shirt off. It's just to the left of his sternum, about three centimeters above his nipple. He scans the now-naked patient quickly for any more holes, but as far as he can see that's the only one. He'll obviously need a full secondary survey, but that can wait until after they have the chest tube in.

"Pressure's forty over palp!" Yuuri shouts as he tears off the blood pressure cuff and replaces it with a tourniquet so he can hunt for a second IV site.

 _Fuck._

A glance at Leo and his intern tells Yuri that they're still too far from starting their chest tube. The intern, in a stunning display of surgical dexterity, has managed the drop the scalpel on the floor. Leo is already moving to procure a new one, but as far as Yuri's concerned, the patient doesn't have the time to wait for that. He needs his tension pneumothorax relieved _now_ , before he decompensates completely and this turns into a trauma code. Needle decompression it is, then.

"Needle him!" Yuri roars at Guang Hong. He's vaguely aware that someone else has shouted the same thing from behind him. For a second, he assumes it was Viktor, before he realizes that the voice had come from the right.

 _Altin._

Fucking seriously? They can't be more than three minutes into this case and already he's stepping on Yuri's toes. Yuri turns his head slightly, casting his most baleful glower over his shoulder. Altin just gazes back at him impassively. Yuri is rapidly becoming convinced that the man has some sort of congenital defect that caused him to be born without any muscles of facial expression.

"Sorry," Altin says. For an instant, Yuri thinks he sees something in his face flicker, the slightest quirk of the corner of the left side of his mouth that could almost be the start of a smirk or maybe even a smile. It's subtle and so barely there that even in the moment, Yuri isn't certain he's not imagining it. Then it's gone – if it was ever there in the first place – and Altin's face is once again infuriatingly blank. He waves his right hand in Yuri direction, making what Yuri chooses to interpret as a conciliatory gesture, and adds, "It's your patient."

 _Damn right, it is_ , Yuri thinks as he focuses the whole of his attention back on the trauma resuscitation in front of him. At the head of the bed, Guang Hong has turned and is frantically digging through the cart behind him for a 14-gauge needle with which to carry out Yuri's order. Yuri makes a mental note to talk to him about that later. If Guang Hong expects to be doing trauma airways, he needs to have decompression needles at his fingertips. In the moment, however, Yuri doesn't have time for helpful and supportive constructive criticism, not when he has a trauma patient with a chest wound and barely a blood pressure in front of him.

Yuri reaches into the front pocket of his scrubs and produces his own 14-gauge needle. Two steps later, he's even with the patient's chest. He feels for his landmarks with his left hand – second intercostal space, midclavicular line – before jamming the needle into the chest with his right. As he pulls the needle back, leaving only the catheter in the chest wall, he hears the satisfying rush of air that tells him his procedure was a success. That should buy Leo plenty of time to walk his intern through the chest tube.

He steps back to the foot of the bed once again, before he runs the risk of losing his grasp on the resuscitation as a whole. Yuuri's gotten the second IV and hung two liters of normal saline wide open. Mickey's rechecking the blood pressure after the decompression. The patient is still awake and more or less talking, even if the most coherent thing Yuri's heard him say so far is his name. Leo and his intern look like they're finally ready to start the chest tube. The intern has a clean 10-blade in her hand and is counting ribs, feeling out the location for her chest wall incision.

"Okay, we're in," Leo announces a minute later. Yuri watches the intern advance the tube through the chest wall between the fourth and fifth ribs and into the pleural space. Leo, in turn, has reached for the Pleur-evac and is in the process of connecting its tubing to the exposed end of the chest tube in order to allow it to drain. Once successful, he unclamps the chest tube, and immediately blood begins pouring out of the tube into the Pleur-evac. "Fuck," says Leo, "That's a lot of blood."

He's not wrong. By the time Yuri looks down at the Pleur-evac where it's sitting on the floor, there's already 500 cc in it with still more pouring out of the chest tube. "Get blood hanging!" Yuri barks at blood bank. "Two units O positive."

The women to their credit already have their cooler open and a moment later, have produced from within it two units of O positive blood. Yuuri and Mickey each grab a unit. Quickly, they disconnect the normal saline running into each IV and replace it with blood. Yuri looks back at the Pleur-evac. There's over a liter of blood in there now, and as Yuri watches, the level reaches and then surpasses the black hash mark representing one and a half liters as well. That means:

"He's going to need a thoracotomy," Yuri says. The bullet probably lacerated one of the major pulmonary arteries. The patient is going to need his chest opened in the operating room by the surgeons for direct visualization and control of the bleeding.

Leo glances down at the Pleur-evac and nods his agreement. "Do you want to put in a cordis down here or in the OR?" he asks Leo.

"What was his pressure after the chest tube?" Leo asks.

"Hundred over sixty," Mickey supplies.

Leo shrugs. "We have good peripheral access. We can get a central line upstairs if we need it."

Yuri nods. "Okay, Emil, let's get a chest x-ray. Then we'll finish the secondary survey and package him for the OR."

Emil moves immediately to slide his x-ray plate under the patient's chest. With some prompting by Leo, the trauma intern begins her careful head-to-toe and front-to-back hunt for additional injuries. It's largely a murmured litany of negative findings aside from hole in the upper chest that they all already knew was there anyway. "Head atraumatic, no C-spine tenderness, abdomen soft and nontender…" Yuri doesn't tune her out entirely, but he does take the opportunity to turn to Viktor.

"Anything to add, old man?" he asks. As much as Yuri hates interference from trauma surgeons, he does kind of legally need the approval of his own attending.

"No," says Viktor, smiling so widely Yuri can't imagine it's not hurting his face. He brings his hands up, clasped in front of his chest. "Oh, Yurio, you did so well. I'm so proud of you!" For a moment, Yuri thinks Viktor might try to hug him and seriously contemplates the pros and cons of putting a scalpel in his carotid. It would almost certainly be eminently satisfying, but Yuri wasn't sure the paperwork, criminal charges, and expulsion from the residency program would be worth it. Also, he'd only be making more work for himself in the trauma bay anyway. Honestly, it's that last thought that gives him the most pause.

He settles instead for: "Don't call me that."

Emil's chest x-ray reveals what they all knew was there: a hemopneumothorax with a chest tube now properly in place. The trauma intern's secondary survey does discover a second hole in the upper back, presumably the exit wound, though Yuri knows better than to speculate on forensics. That's not his job and not mention its own legal minefield.

"OR three is ready for us," Leo announces.

Sara has already switched the patient over to the portable oxygen tank. Yuuri tosses the cardiac monitor into the stretcher. "We're good to go," he says.

"My patient then?" says a low voice into Yuri's right ear. Before Yuri can even nod, Altin is stepping past him, addressing additional orders at the remainder of the trauma bay. His voice is still low, but it's sure, and it commands the attention of the trauma team in a way Yuri can only ever accomplish by shouting. It makes Yuri hate him a little.

He ends up glaring at Altin's back until the patient leaves for the operating room.

Yuri was right, of course. He doesn't leave his shift anywhere near on time. Even after the trauma is out of his bay and into the operating room, he still has six other patients he needs to tie up before he can sign out to Georgi and go home. He admits the old, confused lady for her urinary tract infection to the medicine floor and the fifty-something man with his positive troponin to the telemetry service. The pair of siblings with viral gastroenteritis he sends home with Zofran now that they've finally stopped puking and are tolerating juice and crackers. He does end up signing out to Georgi more than he would have liked – follow up on an ultrasound for pregnant vaginal bleeding and a CT for right lower quadrant pain – but at some point he really does need to leave. He has to be back in what is now less than ten hours for his next shift, and he would like to get at least a few hours of sleep before then.

In the end, it's well after nine in the morning when Yuri finally leaves the hospital. The July sun is blinding as Yuri steps out of the employee entrance. He feels around in his work bag for his sunglasses, cursing to himself when he realizes they're still at his apartment. Not that it's particularly far to his train, but he would rather not be stuck squinting against the brightness the whole way.

"Do you have a long walk?" comes a voice from behind him. Yuri turns to find Otabek Altin dressed in tight jeans and a leather jacket and standing beside a motorcycle. Yuri feels his pulse quicken and tells himself it's just because the surgeon had startled him and definitely not because he currently looks _impossibly_ _fucking hot_. Sure, he'd looked good in scrubs earlier, but as far as Yuri is concerned, this new aesthetic is on an entirely different level of attractive.

"Just to the train," Yuri manages to respond. He's proud of how his voice comes out, steady and not all like he just nearly swallowed his own tongue. Altin's brow furrows, and Yuri belatedly remembers that he's new to the area. "It's like three blocks," he elaborates.

"I'll walk with you," Altin offers. Before Yuri can protest he continues, "I don't know how it is here, but where I did my fellowship one shooting means more are coming. Someone is always looking for revenge, and if they can't find the guy who pulled the trigger sometimes anyone else will do."

He's not wrong Yuri knows, but that doesn't stop him from protesting. "I can take care of myself." He has pepper spray and everything.

There it is again, that tiny, nearly imperceptible flicker in the corner of Altin's mouth. This time Yuri's convinced it's definitely there. Maybe Otabek Altin is capable of generating facial expressions after all. "I don't doubt that. I saw you in the bay today," Altin responds, and Yuri feels himself go warm. "I'm just saying two is safer than one."

Yuri wants to argue, but he knows he's already blushing furiously, and suddenly he finds he can't bear to look at Altin's stupid attractive self for one more instant. "Fine. Suit yourself," he mumbles, turning around and setting off once again toward the train. He faces resolutely forward, willing the heat out of his cheeks. Behind him, the rasping sound of motorcycle tires being wheeled over pavement is the only indication that Altin is even following him.

They walk the first two blocks in increasingly uncomfortable silence. Around them, the city bustles in the morning sunshine. People flit in and out of storefronts, eager to get their errands done before the oppressive midday heat sets in. It's already at least eighty degrees with a forecast, Yuri knows, for nearly one hundred by noon. There will be more gunshot wounds later today, he predicts, as the heat drives people out of their stuffy apartments and shortens tempers explosively. _Sun's out, guns out_ is the rule of this city.

"Where do you take the train to?" Altin asks eventually, interrupting Yuri's conjecture about the upcoming eventfulness of Georgi's shift. Yuri tells him his stop without turning around, which is why it takes him a solid ten seconds to realize Altin is no longer following him. Eventually, he becomes aware that the crunch-crunch of the motorcycle tires has dropped off. He does turn around then, only to find Altin standing a dozen steps back and holding out a helmet towards Yuri. "Here," he says motioning at Yuri with the helmet. "Get on. I'll take you home."

Yuri gapes at him.

"I live around the corner," Altin adds by way of explanation.

Yuri's never ridden on a motorcycle before, and the entire experience is vaguely terrifying in that sort of rollercoaster way where intellectually you know you're probably not about die but good luck convincing your lizard brain of that. He's pretty sure Altin is going extra slow too for Yuri's benefit, a fact Yuri is simultaneously annoyed by and deeply appreciative of. He can't complain too much, however. It's definitely faster than taking the train, and the delightfully rock-hard abs under his fingertips as he grips tightly at Altin's midsection are a nice bonus as well.

Twenty minutes later, they're outside Yuri's apartment. Yuri lives in a second floor walk-up in an area of town just past the cusp of gentrification. It's still cheap enough to afford on a resident's salary but comes with at least seventy-five percent less chance of murder than if he lived closer to the hospital, and the commute really isn't that bad on most days. Most importantly, the nearest bar-cum-liquor store is less than a block away.

Yuri detangles his arms from around Altin's midsection, with rather more reluctance than he would like to admit, and slides off the bike, unclipping his borrowed helmet as he does so. Otabek is still astride the bike. Yuri faces him.

"Thank you…" he starts, hesitating a moment before deciding to finish with: "Doctor Altin." It sounds weird to him. Yuri's not usually one for addressing attendings by their title and last name. Viktor is Viktor, Chris is Chris, and so on. Dr. Feltsman is Dr. Feltsman, sure, but that's because he's the perennially grumpy chair of the entire emergency medicine department. Even Yuri isn't bold enough to call him Yakov. This is the first time he's meeting Altin, however, and the man did just give him a free ride home. Yuri's willing to err on the side of over-formality at the moment.

Altin's lips quirk again in what Yuri is starting to realize passes for the stoic man's smile. "It's Otabek. Please. Especially since we went to med school together."

Wait, _what._

All thought processes in Yuri's brain immediately grind to a halt, then start back up in overdrive, sifting back through his memories of medical school and trying to find even a single one that contains Otabek Altin. He comes up blank, which is surprising, to say the least. Not that Yuri was the most social person at his medical school. Actually he'd spent most of his time oscillating between simply being annoyed by the majority of his classmates and actively wanting to strangle them. However he is pretty damn sure he would remember a classmate who wore leather, rode a motorcycle, and generally just looked like _that_. Unless Otabek is like that awkward nerdy kid every high school has that suddenly gets super-hot after graduation. That must be it.

"I'm not surprised you don't remember me. I was a fourth-year when you were a first-year," Altin – no, _Otabek_ , Yuri corrects himself mentally – continues. "But I volunteered to help out with one of your anatomy labs that spring. The one day I was there, you were arguing with the instructor over something. I can't even remember what. What I do remember though were your eyes. In that moment, they were so focused, so determined. They reminded me of a soldier's eyes. It stuck with me. After I graduated, I always regretted not getting to know you."

Yuri is going to spontaneously combust. He's going to burst into flames and burn to a crisp right here on the sidewalk, and somehow he's sure his ashes will still find a way to be blushing. _Goodbye, Grandpa_ , he thinks, _goodbye, Potya._ The cause of death on his death certificate is going to read: immolation secondary to ridiculous compliments from an even more ridiculously attractive man. He wonders if that makes the manner of death a homicide.

Otabek is still looking at him with that faint, barely-there smile. Yuri feels like he should say something, but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out. He closes his mouth, opens it again, and then closes it again. He's got nothing. His brain is blank except for two words richoching around an otherwise empty cranium: _soldier's eyes_.

If Otabek is fazed by his lack of response, Yuri can't tell. "I'll see you tonight at work, then?" he asks. Yuri just nods.

He's still standing on the sidewalk five minutes later, long after Otabek's motorcycle has disappeared around the corner.


	2. chapter two

Yuri is going to strangle the new trauma surgeon. He's going to wrap an entire length of IV tubing around his neck and pull until his whole stupid face pops off. Then he's going to resuscitate him just for the satisfaction of murdering him again. He's thinking of maybe having him drawn and quartered the second time, or possibly flayed alive.

It's been two weeks since he first met Otabek Altin, and Yuri's opinion of the trauma surgeon is currently in a death spiral. He knew this was coming; it was inevitable really. Sure, the ride home and the weird compliments and the _muscles_ had earned him some initial brownie points, but in the end, surgeons always turn out to be surgeons. Why the ability to cut out an appendix seems to automatically transform people into self-righteous pricks, Yuri will never understand, but holy shit, it does. Somehow, it really, really does.

Currently, however, the source of Yuri's ire is nowhere to be found. Fortunately, Leo is serving as a passable surrogate. They two of them are now standing about five centimeters shy of being literally nose to nose in the trauma bay. No one has thrown any punches yet, but their original reasonable discussion of alternative clinical practices has long ago devolved into a shouting match.

It's not like Yuri was having a particularly good day to begin with. It's only three in the afternoon, but Yuri's already had three codes and two additional ICU admits plus a stroke alert that ended up getting lytics. He's intubated twice and walked the intern through a central line. He's tired and hungry and hasn't peed in nine hours. Yuri has neither the time nor the energy for dealing with surgery's bullshit, and yet bullshit is all he's getting.

"I'm sorry, Yuri, but we want a pan-scan. My _attending_ –" Leo is not subtle about the emphasis "—wants a pan-scan."

The patient in question is a 4-year-old autoped, although to say that the boy was actually _hit_ by a car seems to be a wild overstatement. Per bystanders, the car had been turning left from a complete stop and had clipped the boy with the very edge of its front bumper. The kid had been knocked to the ground, but after some initial tears, had been up and doing veritable laps around the block by the time medics had arrived.

Of course, now that the kid is lying in the trauma bay, surrounded by strangers wielding needles and terrifying-looking medical equipment, he's completely inconsolable. As far as Yuri's concerned, he's clearly more scared than actually injured. Sure, he cries when you exam his neck and cries when you exam his abdomen, but he also cries the moment someone in a white coat or scrubs comes within five feet of him. What he really needs is little more than his mother, a lollipop, and serial exam at the local children's hospital just to make absolutely certain nothing changes. The only reason Yuri even made him a trauma alert in the first place is because he technically can't transfer the kid without doing it.

Now, the trauma team is insisting on what amounts to a whole-body CT scan. This is what he gets for playing by the fucking rules

"That's unnecessary radiation, and you fucking know it!" Yuri hisses back at Leo. The kid is fine, anyone with two eyes and a half a brain can tell that. There's absolutely no reason to expose him to the radiation of a CT scan just to prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

"It doesn't matter what I know, Yuri. It's what Dr. Altin wants. He's not going to clear him for transfer without it."

"He hasn't even seen the patient!"

"Because he's in the OR!" With the stab wound to the abdomen Yuri sent up forty-five minutes ago. He knows this – he knows _all_ of this – because he and Leo have been through it half a dozen times now. He feels like he's on the world's shittiest carousel. Instead of painted horses, Yuri's riding alternating waves of frustration and rage.

"Look," Yuri begins, steeling himself for round seven. He's so focused on Leo that he barely registers the trauma bay doors opening until he hears Minami shout, "Oh, thank god, there you are!" Although, really, it comes out more like _ohthankgodthereyouare_. The intern is as white as sterile gauze and holding an EKG in one hand.

"What!" Yuri growls.

"Dr. Giacometti is doing an LP with Guang Hong, and Mickey handed me _this_ EKG!" He shoves the aforementioned EKG in Yuri's direction. It's crumpled from Minami's grip, and the intern is still waving it wildly, and Yuri can't make arrhythmia or ischemia of it. Snatching it from Minami's hands, he smooths out the worst of the wrinkles, and:

"Fuck." Yuri feels his stomach drop. There are ST segment elevations across the EKG's precordial leads with reciprocal depression inferiorly: a fucking anterolateral STEMI. Apparently, a heart attack had been the one thing missing from Yuri's day, and now the universe has so kindly seen fit to rectify that.

"Which room?" Yuri asks Minami, already reaching for his phone to page the interventional cardiologist. Technically, only the attending is supposed to do that, but if Chris is really elbow-deep in a lumbar puncture, then that's not happening anytime soon. This patient needs a cardiac catherization fucking now. The administration can yell at Yuri later, after the patient is in the cath lab getting stents in his coronaries.

"I'm scanning this kid," Leo calls from behind him as Yuri bolts out the trauma bay doors. Yuri is officially out of the precious little time he had for this argument in the first place. Right now, he needs to be at the bedside of the patient having a heart attack, not mired in futile arguments with stubborn surgeons.

"Fine," he shouts over his shoulder. "Maybe you can also resect his cancer in twenty years!"

He doesn't wait long enough to hear Leo's response. His phone is already buzzing with the interventional cardiologist's return phone call. He has aspirin to give and heparin to start and a thousand and one other things to do to ensure that this STEMI patient makes it out of the hospital alive and with decent cardiac function. He can always murder certain surgeons at a later, more convenient date.

It turns out to be not quite the worst shift Yuri's ever had. That distinction still belongs to the shift on Christmas night his second year when he ruined his brand new tiger-print sneakers intubating an upper GI bleed. They'd been a gift from his grandfather, and Yuri had ended up buying himself a new pair just so his grandfather didn't feel like he had to. Grandpa shouldn't have to spend his limited finances just because some old lady took too much Motrin and vomited half her blood volume onto Yuri's feet.

That said, it's probably at least top ten. So the very last thing Yuri wants or needs right now is to run into one of the people that so generously contributed to today's staggeringly high marks on Yuri's personal shittiness scale, which, naturally, means he does.

It's just shy of eight in the evening when Yuri steps out of the hospital into the summer twilight. The sun is technically still up but low enough in the sky that the city skyline has long ago cast the streets into shadow. The oppressive heat of the day has dissipated into a warm evening breeze. In the scattered trees, crickets are already starting to buzz. It promises to be a gorgeous night, marred, in Yuri's opinion, by only one thing.

Otabek Altin is waiting at the curb.

His motorcycle is parked on the side of the street just ahead, and Otabek is currently leaning against it, facing the employee exit that Yuri has just walked out of. At first, he doesn't look up from where he's flicking idly through his phone. Yuri allows himself the faint hope that can still avoid a confrontation. For all his promises of violent homicide earlier, he's exhausted. If he's going to kill someone, he'd rather do it after he's at least had a nap.

Of course, today fucking hates Yuri, so an instant later, Otabek looks up and meets Yuri's gaze.

"I heard you were pretty pissed at me," Otabek says by way of greeting, standing up fully and sliding his cellphone into his back pocket. He doesn't look angry with Yuri, but then he doesn't look anything at all. His face is as inscrutable as ever.

Yuri just grunts in response. He doesn't know what Otabek wants, but if it's to pick a fight, it's going to have to wait. The only three things Yuri's planning to do tonight are get drunk, pet his cat, and pass out on some horizontal surface – probably either his couch or his bed, but he's not willing to rule the floor out entirely.

Except, apparently, Otabek isn't trying to pick a fight. Instead, he reaches around to the back of his bike and, producing his spare helmet, holds it out to Yuri in an echo of the other week. "Here," he says. "Can I make it up to you with a ride home?"

Yuri stares at the proffered helmet, considering. He's still pissed as hell, and he's not sure that a ride home can be considered an even trade for undermining Yuri's medical decision-making and unnecessarily irradiating a child. That being said, he's also exhausted as hell, and the prospect of cutting his commute time in half is almost too good to pass up.

Okay, it actually _is_ too good to pass up. Yuri grabs the helmet. "This doesn't mean I forgive you," he says.

Otabek gives him that tiny little half-smile. "Of course not."

Yuri's fairly certain Otabek drives faster today than he did the last time. They zip around corners at speeds that put Yuri's heart in his throat and his body practically parallel to the pavement. He can't decide whether it's a form of petty revenge against Yuri or that Otabek just figures he doesn't have to take it easy on him now that he's no longer a motorcycle virgin.

That's not the only thing that's different. Tonight, when they arrive outside Yuri's apartment building, Otabek shuts off the bike and dismounts after Yuri. Wordlessly, he stows away Yuri's extra helmet before pulling off and hanging up his own as well.

Yuri crosses his arms, cocks an eyebrow, and waits for Otabek to say whatever it is he so clearly wants to. "I'd like to explain," Otabek says eventually. "If I can. If you'll let me."

Yuri wants to tell him _no_. He wants to tell him to fuck off and leave Yuri to his cat and his vodka and to take his unnecessary CT scans and shove them so far up his ass that he'll need an upper endoscopy to remove them. What he says instead is: "Sure."

That manages to startle a facial expression out of Otabek. His eyes widen a fraction, and his mouth opens in little O. By Otabek's standards, he looks about as surprised as Yuri feels.

"Wait, wait," says Yuri. He holds up a hand to cut off Otabek's explanation before it can start. Whatever this is going to be, Yuri can guarantee he's too sober for it. "If we're going to do this, you're buying me a drink." He jerks his head toward the bar down the block. "Come on."

It's a Tuesday night and long past what passes for happy hour here, so the bar is nearly empty when they walk in. A trio of men that look to be in their mid-fifties are playing darts, poorly, against the far wall. The only two people at the bar itself are a young couple clearly still dressed from work. They don't seem to be speaking to one another, merely alternating between sipping their drinks and checking their respective phones at twenty second intervals. Yuri's left with the distinct impression of a first date that will never lead to a second.

He chooses a barstool as far from the awkward couple he can get. Otabek takes the seat to his left.

"Vodka coke?" The bartender, Mari, asks as she approaches, because, okay, maybe Yuri does come here too often. Yuri nods. Otabek orders a gin and tonic.

They sit in silence while Mari mixes their drinks. Yuri wonders idly if they too look like they're on an awkward first date and then immediately regrets the thought, because, suddenly, the full implications of what he's just done hit Yuri like 120 joules of electricity to the chest wall. He's just demanded that his staggeringly hot coworker _buy him a fucking drink_. It's not a date, but it could easily be one, and while, yes, Yuri's still a little furious at Otabek, he also realizes that he actually kind of, sort of wouldn't mind if it was.

He's blushing by the time Mari arrives with their drinks, but in the low light of the bar, he's reasonably certain Otabek can't tell. At least, Yuri's choosing to believe that. He stares resolutely at his vodka coke and waits for whatever Otabek has to say. Otabek, however, seems content to take his time. The silence between them stretches, broken only by country music radio and the occasional cheers from the men playing darts.

They're about halfway done with their drinks before Otabek finally starts talking. "I had a case in fellowship," he begins. Yuri looks up from his drink and meets Otabek's eyes. His face is still neutral, but Yuri almost thinks he sees something in those eyes, something sad. No, that's not it. Something _haunted_. "He was six years old, almost seven. It wasn't an autoped like tonight. It was an MVC. A rollover. The kid was the backseat passenger, not properly restrained. He seemed fine though. Scared, but fine. I admitted him for observation without any imaging."

He pauses then and takes a long swallow of his gin and tonic before continuing. "Overnight, things got busy. We had more cases going than we really had staff for. The nurse missed a set of vitals, the intern got tied up in the OR, and the kid ended up bleeding out from a splenic lac."

"Shit," Yuri breathes, because he doesn't know what else to say. Those are the nightmare cases. The ones that keep you up at night despite your best efforts to lock the grief away. The ones that challenge your practices and make you second-guess everything you do. The ones that, as a physician, you hope you never have while at the same time knowing that you will. Everyone has them eventually. It's not a question of if, only when.

"It doesn't mean I'm right," Otabek adds. "Scanning all these kids. It's easier – more tangible – to fixate on that one bleed you missed rather than all the kids you're hypothetically giving cancer to in thirty years, but I can't help it. I see his face in every pediatric trauma. I see his _parents'_ faces when I told them their son was gone and because of something _we_ missed. Maybe it makes me coward or a bad doctor or –"

"It doesn't," Yuri interrupts. Just like that his anger has vanished, because: "I get it. I missed a PE once second year." It was Yuri's own nightmare case, his first actually.

The patient had been a young women, just twenty-one-years-old and a college student only a few weeks shy of graduation. She'd come to the emergency department complaining of right flank pain. It was a fairly innocuous chief complaint in someone who was otherwise well-appearing. She'd denied any urinary complaints – dysuria, hematuria, urgency, frequency – but her urine had been positive for both leukocyte esterase and nitrites, so Yuri had treated her as mild pyelonephritis and discharged her home on antibiotics.

She came back eight hours later tachycardic, hypoxic, and hypotensive with a right lower lobe pulmonary embolism on chest CT. She got lytics in the emergency department and spent the next three weeks in the intensive care unit. She left the hospital alive, no thanks to Yuri.

That case had been raked over the coals at the emergency department's morbidity and mortality conference that month. Dr. Feltsman had ranted for nearly an hour on the critical need to consider lower lube pulmonary pathology in the differential for upper abdominal and flank pain. In this patient, he lectured, her borderline tachycardia and history of oral contraceptive use should have been enough to raise the concern for pulmonary embolism.

Afterwards, Yuri had been hyperaware to the point of borderline diagnosable paranoia. "Fucking everyone got a d-dimer after that," he tells Otabek. "For the next six months, if you had pain anywhere between your chin and your belly button, I got a fucking dimer."

Otabek smiles faintly at him over his drink. "I'm sure they were all positive."

"Oh, of course, they were!" Yuri replies, laughing. "And I fucking scanned all of them. For six months! Viktor had to have a full-on intervention on me."

Before him on the bar, his vodka coke is now long since empty. He pokes at the melting ice with his straw. Suddenly, he doesn't feel much like laughing. "I still think about it with every single flank pain, even the most bullshit musculoskeletal stuff. I know – _I know_ – that we have to accept some baseline potential miss rate, or we'd never get anything accomplished, but it still fucking sucks. 'I'm sorry your loved one's dead but don't worry, they only had a 0.1% chance of being dead.' What the fuck does that matter? They're still fucking dead."

He shoves his empty glass forward on the bar and motions to Mari for another round. These aren't conversations Yuri likes having sober. They go better with the fuzz of alcohol wrapped around his brain, dulling the sharp points of emotion that jab eagerly at him as they try to escape the cage Yuri has spent the past several years carefully constructing around them.

Beside him, Otabek takes a final swig of his gin and tonic and then echoes Yuri's motion. "It's a shitty job some days," he concurs. "My father wanted me to be an MBA. Sometimes I think I would have been better off. No six-figure debts, normal human work hours, and a lot less time spent piecing kids' insides back together so they can go get themselves shot again."

Yuri stares at his drink as Mari slides it in front of him. Isn't that the fucking truth. Sometimes Yuri thinks he would do anything to turn back time and take a nice, stable nine-to-five job with weekends and holidays off and where _no one fucking dies_. There's only one problem with that: "I didn't have a choice. A doctor was the only thing I ever wanted to be."

Otabek's voice is rough as he replies, "Yeah. Me too."

They lapse back into silence then, sipping idly at their drinks. Yuri's beginning to get that warm, floaty sensation that tells him that the alcohol is starting to do its job. Suddenly, he's reminded of exactly how exhausted really he is. At the same time, however, he's surprised to find he isn't ready to go home just yet. It's not just that he enjoys Otabek's company, which he does. It's more than that. Talking to Otabek is strangely cathartic in a way that Yuri is wholly unused to. On any other day like this one, Yuri would have gone home to his empty apartment to stew alone in the day's frustrations. Sitting here with Otabek, however, Yuri finds that those frustrations are gone. He feels lighter than he's ever had after such a grueling shift.

"Anyway," Yuri says eventually, "I guess my point is that you're not the only person running around unnecessarily irradiating people."

He grins at Otabek, who smiles back at him. "So what you're saying is that you forgive me?"

"I suppose," Yuri replies, then adds: "This time."

"In that case I just have one question," Otabek says. He turns on his seat so that he faces Yuri head on. "Are we going to be friends or not?" Otabek's still smiling his tiny little half-smile, but his gaze is more intense than Yuri has ever seen it. It bores into Yuri like an IO gun. Yuri's not sure he believes in souls anymore, but if they do exist, he can't help but feel like Otabek is looking directly into his. He hopes Otabek likes what he sees.

"Yeah, sure" Yuri croaks, feeling slightly overwhelmed. "Friends."

Otabek exhales deeply, and only then does Yuri realize that he'd been holding his breath. Yuri can't fathom why. Was Yuri's response really that important to him? Otabek is a smoking hot trauma surgeon who rides a fucking motorcycle. Why would Yuri's, of all people's, friendship ever matter to him?

"Friends," Otabek echoes, holding out his hand to Yuri. Yuri takes it. Otabek's grip is firm and warm, and Yuri's palm tingles with the contact. Yuri doesn't want to let go.

"Don't think this means I won't call you out on your shit, though."

Otabek laughs at that, actually really _laughs_. It catches Yuri off guard, partially because he's never heard it before and partially because it makes his insides go warm in the strangest way. He feels as though someone has just dumped warmed saline into his stomach.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," Otabek says. He's still holding on to his hand.

By the time their second round of drinks is gone, Yuri can no longer ignore the fact that he's rapidly approaching being asleep on his feet. Mari brings their check, and Otabek tosses enough cash onto the bar to cover all four of their drinks. Yuri protests that he doesn't have to. The deal had been _a_ drink, after all. Technically, he should be paying for his second.

"Don't worry about it," says Otabek, sliding off his barstool. "You can get me next time."

Yuri feels his heart flip at that. _Next time_.


	3. chapter three

It quickly becomes an unspoken tradition that Otabek takes Yuri home on the nights – or mornings – when their shifts end at the same time. Not that that ends up being particularly frequent. Both of their schedules are far too erratic, constantly flip-flopping from days to nights and back again. Yuri will be working a day shift while Otabek's on that night, or Otabek will be off while Yuri's pulling an overnight. Once or twice a week, however, Yuri will walk out of the hospital to find Otabek lounged against his bike with his phone in one hand and the spare helmet in the other. It's just often enough that Yuri starts planning his grocery days and budgeting his train fare around it.

It's not often enough that exposure therapy cures Yuri of the fluttering in his chest when he sees Otabek waiting for him. He wonders if he's developing atrial fibrillation.

In the evenings, they usually stop by the bar for a drink or two. Any residual awkwardness left over from their first definitely-not-a-date vanishes quickly. Talking to Otabek is easy, Yuri discovers, which is not something he's used to, at all. Yuri's never been good at making friends, so he's surprised at just how naturally everything seems to come with Otabek. Soon, they find themselves sitting together for hours, nursing their respective gin and tonics and vodka cokes until one or both of them is on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion.

Mostly, they talk about work. It is, unfortunately, the dominant part of both their lives. As a resident, Yuri's work week is legally capped at six days and eighty-hours. In reality, though, he's often at the hospital far longer than that. Otabek's schedule is surprisingly not much different and sometimes even worse. There's no law to prevent Otabek from working forty-eight hours at a stretch if he wanted to.

Occasionally, they do manage to talk about other things. They discover a shared taste in music. Although, to be fair, Otabek's taste in music is literally everything, so it's not hard to find overlap. Apparently, he DJed his way through college and medical school. Yuri's thrill at discovering that is dulled somewhat by the simultaneous revelation that Otabek's happy to remix everything from Britney Spears to Florida Georgia Line if it'll get the club jumping. When Otabek says he likes everything, he means _everything_.

They talk about their families sometimes as well. Yuri shares his concerns about his grandfather's health, which hasn't been quite the same since his heart attack Yuri's intern year. His grandfather, however, is stubborn, and Yuri constantly worries that in refusing to accept his limits, he'll push himself past them. The last thing Yuri wants is his grandfather back in the ICU with a fresh new pair of stents in his coronary arteries. Otabek, in turn, tells Yuri about his strained relationship with his own parents. As their eldest child and only son, they had apparently expected him to have carried on the family line already. His decision to put off marriage and children in favor of years spent in medical school, residency, and fellowship was not well-received at home. The fact that his younger sister is getting married in a few months has only served to further highlight these issues.

Mari clearly thinks they're dating. She winks at Yuri surreptitiously every time he and Otabek show up together. On the days when their schedules are opposite and Yuri comes alone, she escalates to making sad, little _tut-tutting_ sounds and asking him if he's missing his boyfriend. His repeated efforts to dissuade her of her delusion are resolutely ignored. Yuri's going to start taking it out of her tip.

It's the mornings after night shifts that present a dilemma. Most bars, including Mari's, aren't open at seven in the morning, something that Yuri has long considered this one of life's great injustices. There's always Ray's Happy Birthday Bar, a favorite haunt of some of their night shift nurses, but that's so far out of their way as to not really be an option. Instead, on the first of these such mornings, Yuri proposes making do with Bloody Marys at a breakfast café located on the corner just two blocks down from his building. He regrets the suggestion before they've even ordered.

"We are never coming here again," Yuri declares an hour and four drinks later. The door to the café is still swinging shut behind him.

Otabek's brow creases and the corners of his mouth turn down. "I thought the place was cute," he says.

It was. It was fucking adorable, and that was exactly the problem. "Some of us are still in our scrubs," Yuri says. He gestures at his clothing. He had never got into the habit that Otabek clearly has of changing out of his scrubs before leaving work. He doesn't mind wearing them on the subway or to a dive bar like Mari's. He figures they're probably still more hygienic than either of those places. Sitting in a charming café, however, surrounded by Sunday-best grandmas on their way to church is enough to make even Yuri feel disgusting. "I'm covered in literal blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention shit, piss, and vomit. I feel like I just gave every single one of those old ladies MRSA."

Otabek chuckles at that. He's becoming freer with his smiles and easier with his laughs. Yuri still finds each and every one thrilling.

They agree, after that, to spend mornings at one or the other's apartment instead, drinking whatever they might have on hand. That's how Yuri ends up introducing Otabek to Potya, his ancient ragdoll cat and beloved companion since high school. As first meetings go, it's fairly underwhelming. Potya sniffs Otabek's shoes once, then promptly wanders off to curl up on Yuri's bed.

"She likes you," he ends up reassuring Otabek, who clearly does not believe him. It's true, though. By Potya's standards, that's pretty much the height of acceptance. The last time Yuri brought a guy home, Potya peed on his jacket. He doesn't share that last part, though. For some reason, he finds that he's not eager to bring up ex-boyfriends with Otabek.

Otabek, in turn, introduces Yuri to his guinea pig. Yes, his _guinea pig_ , because Otabek Altin, the smoking hot, motorcycle-riding, badass ex-DJ and current trauma surgeon, owns a fucking _guinea pig_.

It's almost two full months into their arrangement before Otabek suggests they head to his place one morning rather than Yuri's. "There's someone I want you to meet," he tells Yuri not at all cryptically as he parks the motorcycle in front of his building. "Since you're always telling me about Potya."

Otabek may live around the corner from Yuri but his apartment complex is far nicer. Ah, the luxuries of an attending's salary. There's a lobby with an actual security guard, not to mention elevators to take them up to the fourteenth floor. Not that Yuri should really complain about the single flight of stairs he has to climb at his place, but he does anyway. Groceries are seriously heavy.

Otabek's apartment is as nice as the rest of his building with high ceilings and large picture windows. Beyond, the city glitters in the morning sun. It'd be pretty, Yuri thinks, if he wasn't so painfully familiar with all the shit that lurked at street level. Otabek's living room is dominated by a large plush couch facing a wall-mounted television. There are several out-of-date gaming systems on the shelf below it. To the right, a bookcase holds Yuri's bodyweight in surgical texts. To the left, there's a cage. Otabek heads directly for the cage, reaches in, and scoops out a brown-and-white ball of fluff.

"This is Obi-Wan Kenobi," he informs Yuri, holding the ball of fluff out towards him. The ball _wheeks_ distressingly at him. Yuri does not laugh. This represents the utter height of his self-control.

That self-control lasts right up until Otabek shows him the pet camera he has set up over the guinea pig's cage. "Oh my god!" Yuri howls. "I thought trauma surgeons were supposed to be cool! But you, you are a complete and utter loser, you know that right? Please tell me you know that." The longer he laughs, the harder he laughs, until he'd double over with his hands on his knees, gasping for air.

"It's so I can check on him at work!" Otabek protests. Yuri can't see his expression through the tears picking at his eyes, but his voice holds not a hint of facetiousness. Yuri just laughs harder.

"Holy shit," he says once he can breathe again. "Do your residents know you're live-streaming your guinea pig in between cases?"

Otabek glares at him, or at least he tries to. It's difficult to look menacing while cradling a guinea pig protectively against your chest. "I got Obi-Wan when I started my intern year. He's been with me through residency and fellowship and now my first attending job," Otabek says. He gazes down at the dumb thing with a soft little smile and strokes a hand along its back. The thing _whirs_ contentedly. Yuri will never admit out loud how impossibly endearing it is. Some people get all worked up over men with babies or men with puppies. Apparently, a man with a rodent is enough for Yuri. He's almost as embarrassed for himself as he is for Otabek. _Almost_.

"When I moved here, Obi-Wan was my only friend in the city," Otabek adds.

Yuri doesn't think. He just says, "Well, you have me now."

Holy _shit_. What the _fuck_. Could he be any more _obvious_? It sounds like he's jealous of the fucking thing. He desperately wants to shove the words back into his mouth, or maybe find a way to travel back in time and prophylactically amputate his own fucking tongue, because never speaking again would honestly be preferable to actually uttering those five words.

He sees the precise moment that Otabek registers what he's said, because Otabek's eyebrows shoot up to his hairline and his eyes go perfectly round. Yuri knows it's not actually medically possible to die of embarrassment, but if maybe, right now, his body might see fit to rupture an aneurysm or develop some ventricular tachyarrhythmia that _would honestly be fucking great_. It doesn't, and Yuri remains agonizingly alive.

He's about to take matters into his own hands and turn, walk out the door, and throw himself into the path of the nearest oncoming truck when Otabek's expression begins to change. It starts with the flicker of the lips that heralds his usual half-smile. This time, however, it doesn't stop there. Instead, it progresses to the most heartbreakingly brilliant smile Yuri has ever seen. There are dimples on his cheeks and not-quite-literal sparkles in his eyes, and it's all directed stunningly at Yuri.

Yuri knows he will be willing to humiliate himself a thousand times over just to see it again.

At work, things remain both the same, while also being somehow, simultaneously, different. Yuri keeps his promise to always call Otabek out on his bullshit. He shouts at him one night until the trauma team agrees to get a CT scan of patient's pelvis after a motor vehicle collision. The x-rays were negative, even to the radiologist's eyes. Several rounds of morphine later, however, and the man still can't bear weight on his right hip. The CT reveals an acetabular fracture. Yuri very definitely does not gloat on the way home.

Those instances, however, are startlingly few and far between. More often, their interactions in the trauma bay are comfortable and easy in a way that only serves to improve their trauma resuscitations. As much as Yuri had resisted unsolicited input from surgeons during his resuscitations, he finds he doesn't mind nearly as much when it's Otabek.

Otabek walks Yuri through his first cricothyroidotomy. It's a burn patient, pulled from a house fire. His entire face and upper torso are covered in third degree burns, and his airway is so swollen that multiple attempts at intubation have already failed. By the time his oxygen saturation starts to drop and Sara begins complaining that he's difficult to ventilate with the bag-valve mask, Yuri already has the cric kit out and open. He doesn't begrudge Otabek's steadying hand over his as he makes the initial incision.

"Nice work," Otabek whispers to him after Yuri has incised the cricothyroid membrane and passed the tube successfully into the trachea. Yuri's thankful that his facemask hides his blush.

After work, however, Yuri's entire paradigm has shifted. He can barely fathom how quickly he gets _used_ to having Otabek there after a shift, to having someone around regularly to talk to about whatever shit case he's had that day. It's not something he's ever had before, unless you count Potya.

That's not to say that Yuri doesn't spend time with his co-residents. JJ aside, he actually does like most of them. He hangs out with Georgi occasionally, usually when he's suffered some new heartbreak and needs Yuri to cry into a beer with him. Except with Georgi, it's more like cry into a strawberry pomegranate mojito. Georgi drinks like the gay man Yuri is. Then there's Mila, who's probably Yuri's best friend in the program. Sometime in intern year, Mila decided to adopt Yuri's admittedly tragic social life as her pet project. Now, she takes it upon herself to drag him out to some club or another once a month.

The issue, especially when it comes to people in his same year like Georgi and Mila, is that if Yuri's not at work, it usually means they are. Sometimes multiple weeks will go by in which the only times he and Mila are awake simultaneously are when they're signing out to each other. After work, therefore, it was always just him and Potya. Without something to compare it to, Yuri had been fine with that. Now on the days when his and Otabek's schedules don't align and Yuri is forced to take the train home by himself, he finds himself feeling not just disappointed but also strangely bereft.

"I'm sorry," he tells Potya on one such evening. She's curled in his lap, graciously deigning to accept scratches behind her ears. "It's not that you aren't a very good listener." It's just that sometimes it's nice to have someone who can actually _understand_.

He ends up texting Otabek, _Can I come over?_

He feels silly as soon as he hits send. Otabek's off tonight – Yuri knows that – but that doesn't mean he's sitting at home doing nothing at all. Just because that's what Yuri does with the majority of his free Saturday nights, doesn't mean Otabek's life is as pitiful as his is. On top of that, Yuri hasn't actually spent time with Otabek outside of their rides home. Maybe Otabek isn't interested in interacting with Yuri in any other context.

Potya meows sullenly at him, and Yuri realizes he's been fidgeting with her fur. He's being ridiculous, Yuri knows. Otabek's the one who'd asked to be his friend in the first place. He won't have any problem with Yuri texting him. Also, so what if he has plans. Otabek's allowed to have friends other than Yuri.

Still, it's not until his phone vibrates with a _Sure_. that Yuri actually feels his heart rate return to normal.

He ignores Potya's meowed protests as he slides her off his lap onto the couch beside him before standing up. He shoves his phone in his pocket and grabs his keys. He contemplates grabbing his sweatshirt as well, before deciding against it. He regrets it as soon as he steps outside. With the sun long gone, the night air is chilly. Fall will be here soon. The days are already shortening. Before long, Yuri will both arrive at and leave work in darkness.

He's too lazy to walk back up the stairs, though, so he sets off to Otabek's still shivering slightly. It's not like it's far, anyway. The security guard at the front desk apparently recognizes him because he lets Yuri by with a polite nob. At Otabek's door, Yuri hesitates. It's been all of seven minutes since he sent his first text. Will he look too desperate showing up so soon? The alternative, however, is standing around creepily in Otabek's hallway, and Yuri doesn't want to do that either. Deciding he prefers desperate to creepy, Yuri knocks.

Otabek opens the door. There are two glasses on whiskey balanced in his opposite hand. He offers one to Yuri. "Bad day?"

Yuri nods once and takes the proffered glass. He opens his mouth to speak, then shakes his head and closes it again. It's strange. For some reason, despite all his haste to get here, he's suddenly not ready to talk just yet. Yuri enters the apartment wordlessly. He makes his way over the Otabek's couch and sits, leaning back and taking a sip of the whiskey. He can't identify the brand, but it's surprisingly smooth, not like the cheap shit Yuri usually buys.

Otabek takes a seat next to him. In contrast to Yuri, who's sunk against the back cushions, Otabek leans forward with his elbows propped on his knee. He sips his own drink. "Was it the kid?" he asks. Yuri feels himself tense, which he knows will be affirmation enough for Otabek. "I heard from Seung Gil," Otabek adds by way of explanation.

It was a baby actually. The patient had been a gorgeous seven-month-old infant, all chubby cheeks and big brown eyes. Medics had brought him in actively seizing. He'd already seized through two rounds of benzodiazepines in the field, and nothing that Yuri threw at him on the emergency department had any effect either. Fosphenytoin and phenobarbital had all the effect of saline flushes. By the time, Yuri made the decision to sedate him with propofol and intubate him, he'd been seizing for almost thirty minutes.

The official story from the family as relayed by Yuuko, one of their best paramedics, was that the father had found him seizing when he went to wake him up from his nap for a bottle. The kid was otherwise healthy. He had been full-term, he was up-to-date on his vaccinations, and he'd had no recent fevers or illness. Yuuko had already checked a temperature and blood sugar and found both to be normal. In short, there was no clear reason for him to have been seizing.

Yuri's best guess had been improperly diluted formula. Then, he saw the head CT: Bilateral subdural hematomas. There's not many ways seven-month-olds end up bleeding into their skulls. "He might have rolled off the bed earlier when his sister was playing with him," the father had offered when Yuri told him what they had found.

The retinal hemorrhages and posterior rib fractures told a different story.

Yuri's fingers clench around his glass of whiskey. "He fucking shook him," he whispers. He can feel his hands starting to shake as the anger surges once again inside him. He sets his glass on the coffee table in front of him before he spills it. Suddenly, Yuri can't be sitting anymore. "He fucking shook him!" he shouts as he surges to his feet. From across the living room, comes a distraught _wheek_ as Obi-Wan flees for the cover of his plastic hut.

He's been like this all day, exploding into fits of rage before forcing himself back into a semblance of composure long enough to see the next patient. It's a tactic Yuri's gotten remarkably good at over the years. As a teenager, he had spent nearly all of his time angry, usually over stupid shit. Even as intern, he'd snapped more than once at some non-emergent patient looking for a pregnancy test or a work note, who didn't understand why they had to wait to be seen while Yuri coded a child. Now he just swallows his emotions and goes back to work. He can't change people's fundamental selfishness. He can only waste his own time, and in the emergency department, there's no time to be wasted on anger or grief when there are always, always, _always_ more patients to see.

"How do people _do_ shit like that?" He's pacing now. He stalks furiously back and forth in front of the couch. His foot catches on the coffee table with a _smack_ , and Yuri doesn't even wince. "Don't shake your fucking child. Everyone knows that. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight, don't invade Russia in winter, and _don't fucking shake your fucking child_."

Yuri yanks the elastic off his ponytail and runs both hands through his hair with just enough force to hurt. He needs to calm himself back down again. If he keeps this up, he's going to spook Otabek as badly as he just spooked Obi-Wan. He takes one deep breath and then a second. It doesn't help.

Otabek, however, doesn't appear to be bothered in the slightest. He just gazes up at Yuri from where he's still seated on the sofa. He face is as impassive as always, but his eyes are pools of warmth that Yuri feels like he could sink into.

"You still saved his life," Otabek tells him. There's a force in his tone that belies his quiet words. "You know you can't control what other people do, Yuri, only what you do, and what you did today was save that kid's life."

Yuri takes a long gulp of the liquor. Then he takes another. He feels his throat burn with the alcohol. It's weird; his eyes are burning as well. "What kind of life did I save, though?" He's not shouting anymore. "He was seizing for over half an hour, Otabek. He had blood everywhere in his head. Even if he survives this, do you really think he'll be anything but neurologically devastated?"

Otabek shrugs. It's heavy, and Yuri can almost see the residual weight Otabek bears from his own past patients. "I don't know, Yuri. Kids are resilient." He's not wrong. Amputate an eighty-year-old's leg, and she'll never leave the hospital alive. Amputate an eight-year-old's leg, and he'll be running on a prosthesis in three months. "He might never be normal, but I wouldn't be shocked if he had meaningful recovery."

"I don't want him to have meaningful recovery," Yuri whispers. "I want this to never have happened in the first place."

"We're doctors, Yuri, not gods. We can't save everyone. We knew that going in." He's right, of course. Otabek is right, and Yuri fully knows it. He's known it since he was three years old and sitting at his grandmother's deathbed. In the end, no matter how hard they try, doctors always lose the fight.

Suddenly, Yuri is exhausted. His rage is beginning to seep away, and it's as though all his energy over the last few hours has been sustained by nothing else. With the anger dissipating, Yuri's tired down to his bones. He sinks onto the couch beside Otabek, mirroring his position, bent forwards with his elbows on his knees. They're not quite touching, but they're close enough that Yuri can feel Otabek's warmth all along his left side. He wants nothing more than to lean into him, to close those last few centimeter and lay his head on Otabek's shoulder. The impulse is as inexplicable as it is overwhelming. Yuri barely resists.

They sit in silence for a few minutes. The only sound is the clattering of ice cubes as one or the other lifts their glass to their lips.

"Were there other kids in the home?" Otabek breaks the silence at last.

"Fucking _five_ ," Yuri replies. Who knows what damage the monster had already inflicted on them as well?

"And you reported him to child protective services."

"Obviously." It was a legal requirement either way.

"So you saved six lives today. Concentrate on that, okay?" Yuri looks up at Otabek from where he's been staring into his glass. Through Yuri's curtain of hair, Otabek gazes back at him. He's not smiling, but something in his eyes conveys the same warmth.

It's a ridiculous idea, Yuri wants to tell him. Focusing on the positives is a lovely piece of advice when you're not drowning in an ocean of negatives. Silver linings are hard to find when the storm cloud is the death or permanent disability of a child, and Otabek has been a doctor long enough to know that as well as Yuri does.

Yet, at the same time, there's something about talking to Otabek that, for Yuri, does actually make things better. He's still far from okay, but, yes, he's better than he had been before their conversation. It's that same sense of catharsis Yuri felt that first night in the bar. It's the same sense, he now recognizes, he's felt to varying degrees every time he gets to decompress with Otabek after a shit shift. It's the reason he'd texted Otabek in the first place, Yuri realizes. It's what he'd been looking for when he arrived at Otabek's apartment, even if he hadn't known it then.

In the end, it works. Yuri falls asleep on Otabek's sofa without drinking himself into a coma, and if he sees the little boy's face in his dreams, he doesn't remember it in the morning.


	4. chapter four

Yuri tries his best to keep things between Otabek and him as professional as possible while at the hospital. Eventually, however, people at work do start taking notice of their friendship. By that, Yuri means that Phichit, one of the internal medicine chief residents and known incorrigible gossip, spies them leaving work together one night, and within twenty-four hours the entire hospital thinks they're dating.

"We're just friends," Yuri spends an entire week repeating ad nauseum to pretty much everyone he comes in contact with on a daily basis. It's ridiculous. Literally, everyone knows that Phichit is a needless drama queen. Yet they all seem more willing to believe his wild rumors than Yuri refutations.

He's subjected to a horrendously uncomfortable meeting with Dr. Feltsman, in which the chairman spends forty-five minutes impressing upon Yuri the important of maintaining professionalism in the setting of workplace romances. Yuri's assurances that no such romance even exists fall on deaf ears. Of course, as uncomfortable as the chair of the emergency medicine department advising Yuri on his imaginary love life is, it has nothing on what Viktor chooses to unleash on him at every opportunity.

"He just gives me rides home, you ancient fuck!" Yuri shouts at him one day after Viktor has cornered him in the break room to offer his and Yuuri's wedding planner for Yuri's use. Yesterday, he'd offered their florist and the day before, their caterer. It was as though they were in some sort of competition to see which would be exhausted first: Yuri's patience or Viktor's supply of wedding-related professions. Yuri, of course, lost.

Viktor makes a _hmm_ -ing sound. His left eyebrow is cocked in a perfect arch. "And rides home require you to go to the bar together every night?" He never does manage to figure out how the fuck Viktor even knows that.

Mila is the only one who actually believes Yuri when he tells her he's not dating Otabek. This is does not turn out to be quite the boon that Yuri might have hoped it would be. Mila makes no effort to help Yuri dispel the circulating rumors. Instead, she devotes her time to trying to convince Yuri that he _should_ be dating Otabek.

"Everyone already thinks you are. At some point you might as well just do it," she tells him one evening. They're both in the emergency department, sitting in front of their respective computers. Yuri is throwing lab orders in for the chest pain patient that the intern is currently seeing. Mila, whose shift actually ended twenty minutes ago, is slogging her way through her backlog of patient charts. It had been a busy day, and Mila still has nearly thirty charts without even a history or physical exam documented that she needs to at least start before she goes home.

Yuri clicks the _sign_ button on his computer screen. Mila's statement is both quintessential Mila logic and totally not how the world fucking works. Yuri refuses to dignify it with a response. Instead he turns to Yuuri, who's the chest pain patient's nurse, to let him know what he's just ordered. "Basic labs, troponin, and a chest x-ray," he tells him. Yuuri smiles and nods.

Mila, because she is a terrible friend, refuses to let him ignore her. "Oh, come on," she says when Yuri doesn't reply. She pokes at his shoulder with a single manicured nail. "You have to know that he likes you."

Yuri doesn't even know if Otabek likes _guys_.

"JJ says he does." It's only after Mila responds that Yuri even realizes he's voiced his last thought out loud.

Well, shit. There goes his plan to ignore Mila until she talked herself hoarse and finally couldn't bother him anymore. Yuri glances longingly toward the ambulance bay doors, willing medics to roll with a stroke or a stabbing or _something_ that might give him an excuse to extract himself from this conversation. At this point, he'd take vaginal irritation. It would be the most willing pelvic exam he's ever done.

For an instant, Yuri think his prayers have been answered. The ambulance bay doors slide open to reveal…

Emil, arms laden with snacks, clearly having taken the shortcut back from his cafeteria run.

 _Fuck_.

Yuri resigns himself to his fate and turns back towards Mila. It's only then that he processes the full implications of her words. A chill washes through him. It's as though someone has started an IV and begun infusing ice water into Yuri's veins, because:

 _JJ_? Otabek's dated _fucking JJ?_

JJ is another of Yuri's fellow fourth-years. He's loud, brash, and more or less put on this earth solely to annoy Yuri. He's been the bane of Yuri's existence since he transferred into their program at the beginning of second year. It's uncommon to change residencies though not unheard of. Every once in a while, it takes someone one or two years of residency training in a specialty to realize that they made the wrong decision. That's what happened to JJ. He had been almost three years into a general surgery residency when he decided to switch to emergency medicine instead. In most cases, Yuri would have applauded someone's obvious enlightenment. Where JJ's concerned, Yuri wishes he'd never seen that particular light.

Yuri wracks his brain, trying to figure out _how_? _why_? and _when_? this ungodly union could possibly have occurred. Mila, because she is an asshole who Yuri _does not know why he is friends with_ , breaks into peals of laughter. "Holy shit, you should see the look on your face!" she screeches.

"Shut up!" he hisses at her, which, of course, she doesn't. Instead, she just laughs harder and louder until she has tears rolling down her face. Yuri's going to stab her in the carotid with the scalpel he keeps in his white coat pocket just to shut her up. Nurses are staring, including Yuuri, who Yuri knows talks to Phichit semi-regularly. They went to undergrad together. The last thing Yuri wants right now is to add fuel to the dumpster fire these rumors have become.

"Oh my god," Mila manages to choke out a solid five minutes later. She dabs the tears from her eyes carefully so as to not ruin what's left of her mascara. Not that there's much to salvage after a twelve-hour shift. "You really, really like him."

Yuri's fingers curl around his scalpel. "I do not," he denies reflexively.

It's not untrue as far he's concerned. Obviously, he does like Otabek, but as a _friend_ , which is clearly not what Mila is implying. Okay, sure, he finds Otabek attractive, but anyone with 20/200 corrected vision would find Otabek objectively attractive. That's just science. Yuri has a hot friend, but so what? Why does it have to be anything more than that?

Mila _boops_ him on the nose with the microphone Yuri vehemently wishes she would just start dictating into and leave Yuri alone. What happened to all those charts that Mila just, _oh, could never go home without starting_? "Don't worry, kitten," she says. "Otabek and JJ aren't a thing. JJ just knows Otabek from his old residency. He told me that Otabek dated one of the physical therapists – one of the _male_ physical therapists – there for a while their intern year."

 _Oh._ Well, then.

Honestly, Yuri isn't terribly sure what he feels at first. His head swirls with several emotions at once, and it takes him a moment to even start to identify them. At least one part is relief, relief that Yuri's nemesis has never dated his new friend. He knows it's not at all rational. Objectively, Otabek can have dated – _can still_ date – whoever he fucking wants, just… not _JJ_. Yuri has a line, and that line is JJ.

There's another part of him that's delighted at the prospect that there's something more than a bacterium's chance in an autoclave that Otabek might actually be interested in him. As Yuri has no problem admitting, he does find Otabek attractive, and yes, okay, he's occasionally wondered if that might _maybe_ be reciprocated.

Then there's a part that's tiny but probably the most damning of them all: jealousy aimed at this unnamed physical therapist. Individually, Yuri might have been able to write any one of them off. Together, they point towards one, inevitable conclusion:

Mila is right. Yuri does really, really like Otabek.

Okay, so he likes Otabek. If that little emotional awakening is what Mila was gunning for, she's going to be disappointed, because Yuri knows fuckall what to do with that knowledge. The principal issue is that Yuri is genuinely invested inthe relationship that he and Otabek already have. If Otabek was simply a spectacularly hot coworker who was down to fuck that might be one thing, but in the past few months, he's become much more than that. He's become Yuri's support system, the person he leans on, his decompression valve after work. The thought of jeopardizing that is anathema to Yuri. He'd rather perform an awake fiber optic intubation on _himself_.

Otabek, likewise, seems perfectly content with their relationship as it is. He continues to give Yuri rides home every day that he's able, but outside of that, their contact has remained fairly limited, and the few instances Yuri can think of have still been work-related in the end. Yuri can't help but assume that if Otabek wanted more, he would have done, well, _something_ by now.

In fairness, though, Otabek does seem to do relatively little outside of work at all. Yuri does realize that's a bit pot-calling-the-kettle-black, but that doesn't make the kettle any less black. Besides, Yuri can at least say he has his monthly clubbing dates with Mila, even if they are about eighty percent involuntary. Otabek, however, seems to genuinely do nothing but hang out with Obi-Wan. This is actually distressing to Yuri for at least one particular reason:

"I thought things were supposed to get _better_ once I became an attending, but your life is as pathetic as mine," Yuri grouses at Otabek one day. "Tell me again what I'm looking forward to?"

It's Saturday morning, and they're both coming off the Friday overnight shift. Friday nights in the emergency department are often a mixed bag. On one hand, most people have something better to do than come to the emergency room on a Friday night for a bullshit reason like a pregnancy test or because they finally decided to get that three months of back pain checked out. The result is Yuri wastes a lot less time seeing things that could be better served by a primary care doctor or even ten bucks spent at CVS.

On the other hand, Friday nights usually mean drinking, and drinking usually means violence. Some people get teary when the drink, some people get huggy, but this city mostly just gets stabby. Last night had gifted Yuri and Otabek with two traumas from the same bar fight: one basilar skull fracture courtesy of a bat to the back of the head and one stab wound to the chest. That was it, though. As far as Fridays go, it wasn't too bad.

Currently, Yuri is sprawled on his back across Otabek's ridiculously comfortable sofa. Aside from his right hand, which cradles a glass of wine, he's completely limp. Yuri takes a sip of his pinot grigio, letting the alcohol warm him from the inside out. Autumn has finally caught up with them fully. As the days have grown longer, their rides home have become increasingly brisk. This morning, it had been downright chilly. Now, between the wine and Otabek's high east-facing windows letting the morning sun spill across Yuri's face, Yuri's beginning to feel downright snug. He could easily fall asleep like this, if that didn't mean missing out on time spent with Otabek.

"My life isn't pathetic," Otabek protests. He's seated on his desk chair opposite Yuri with his feet propped up on the coffee table between them. His own glass of wine is nearly empty.

Yuri shifts just enough to be able to level Otabek with what he hopes is his most skeptical look. "Seriously? When was the last time you did something outside of work? And no, _this_ ," he gestures vaguely between the two of them with his wine glass, "doesn't count. You just drove me home. It's still work-related."

Otabek's quiet for a long moment, and Yuri assumes he's sieving through memories, trying to find an honest answer to Yuri's question. Then, he drops his gaze to his wine glass, and says, "We could do something sometime. If you wanted."

Yuri stops breathing. He full on, respiratory arrest, intubate-and-ventilate-him stops breathing.

It's an overreaction, and he knows it. _Do something_ is a completely innocuous pair of words that could mean just about anything. It's just that something in Otabek's demeanor – the note of uncertainty in his voice, his uncharacteristic refusal to meet Yuri's eyes, the addition of _if you wanted_ – leaves Yuri with the distinct impression that Otabek has just asked him out.

Unless he's just projecting, which, realistically, yeah, he's probably projecting.

He forces himself to take a breath in. "What did you have in mind?" he says carefully when he then convinces himself to exhale.

Otabek shrugs and continues to study his remaining half-swallow of white wine like any second it's going to start speaking and tell him whether a thoracotomy with aortic cross-clamping has any utility in abdominal trauma. "I don't know. What's there to do around here?" he asks like he hasn't been living in this neighborhood for over four months already.

Jesus fucking Christ, could Otabek be any more opaque? For fuck's sake, throw Yuri some kind of hint here. He studies Otabek's face as the other man continues to stare resolutely at his wine glass, but of course it's completely neutral. Yuri's actually gotten quite good at reading Otabek's tiny, nearly imperceptible facial expressions over the last few months, but not today. Today, Otabek is giving nothing away. Yuri wants to scream.

 _Just ask_ , he thinks. If Otabek says no, it will be easy enough to laugh it off. Yuri can claim he was just teasing Otabek for his ambiguity and that, _no, of course, he didn't actually think Otabek might want to date him_. Yuri, however, still can't make himself form the words. The question lodges in his throat. Yuri can feel it sitting there in his vallecular like an actual, physical presence. He tries to swallow, and, when that fails to clear the obstruction, he coughs.

Otabek looks up at the sound, and Yuri panics. Yuri's never had much of a poker face, and he's certain that right now everything he's feeling is written across it in 500 pt font that Otabek couldn't possibly fail to read. Yuri needs to say something, _anything_ , to distract Otabek. Unfortunately, his thought process has long ago not just derailed but careened off a cliff and exploded in a gorge. He opens his mouth and:

"There's a cat café down town!" Yuri nearly shouts as he sits suddenly upright and barely avoids spilling his wine in the process. "I've been trying to get Mila to go with me for like a year now, but she keeps being lame and whining about her allergies. Like, take a fucking H1 blocker and suck it up! Right? Who cares if you get all sniffly and your eyes itch? Cats are totally worth it!"

Yuri's babbling, and he knows it, but it does seem to be working. Otabek is smiling at him and shaking his head gently. "Won't Potya get jealous?" he asks.

Yuri scoffs. "It's not like I'm going to actually adopt any of them. Just drink coffee and pet them for a while." He drops his voice to just above a whisper. "She'll never have to know."

"I won't tell her, if you don't," Otabek says. He grins at Yuri. Yuri is not standing so by definition he cannot be weak in the knees. He just wants to make that clear.

It takes them a while to actually come up with a day that, not only do they both have off, but one of them isn't recovering from a night shift. Finally, however, they find a Thursday two weeks from now that works for both of them. Yuri marks it on his Google calendar. He very resolutely does not say, _It's a date._

"It's totally a date," Mila assures him when he calls her before her shift the following day. He's freaking out just a little bit, and hey, Mila has already appointed herself champion of his social life. If that comes with the price of being woken up an hour early before a night shift, then that's what she signed up for. Yuri doesn't want to hear her complain.

"You don't know that," Yuri counters. He's still in bed with Potya curled up on his chest. He strokes his fingers through her soft fur idly. She's about to start meowing for her dinner so Yuri allows himself to enjoy this peace while he can.

Mila's sigh sounds harsh through his phone's speaker. "I do, Yuri, on account of I have two functioning eyes and can see the way he looks at you. Which is, incidentally, the same way you look at him. Literally, the entire hospital can see it."

"Oh my god, would you stop listening to Phichit, _please_."

There's a rustling on the other end of the phone line, and Yuri can tell Mila's shaking her head. "I don't need to listen to Phichit, okay? Yuri, that boy is so gone on you. I can't believe you don't see it."

Yuri doesn't say anything. He wants it to be true, fiercely, but however, obvious it may be to Mila, it's not at all to Yuri.

"Look," say Mila quietly. Something in her tone has shifted. All the previous undercurrents of teasing have vanished, and she sounds almost gentle. It's completely uncharacteristic of her, and Yuri has no idea what to make of it. "I can't make you do anything you don't want to, Yuri, but honestly? I really think you should tell him you like him. I don't want you to miss your chance with him. I don't want you to miss a chance to be happy. So, just… think about it, Yuri, okay?"

Just to humor her, Yuri does.

He thinks about treating their trip to the cat café like the date that Mila clearly thinks it is. He thinks about Otabek picking him up and paying for his coffee and the smile they might share because they both know what the gesture means. He thinks about walking home hand-in-hand, feeling the warmth of Otabek's palm against his as they lace their fingers together. He thinks about admitting to Otabek that as wonderful as spending a whole day petting cats was, the better part was spending a whole day with Otabek. He thinks about kissing Otabek good-bye, feeling the gentle press of Otabek's lips against his.

He wants it. Oh, god, he wants it.

Also, Mila's right, annoyingly enough. If he does nothing, he misses any chance he might have with Otabek. Otabek will move on. People as attractive as Otabek aren't likely to stay single for long, and the thought of Otabek with someone else feels like being ex-lapped without anesthesia. He just has to be brave. He will be, he promises himself. Their trip to the cat café will be a date, because Yuri will make it one, and if Mila is wrong and Otabek doesn't return his feelings, well then, they'll find a way to get past it.

Yuri spends the next two weeks working up his courage. In the end, it doesn't matter. They never make it to the cat café.


	5. chapter five

It's only in retrospect that Yuri pieces together the mostly full story of what happens. He's sure there are still details missing, but between the initial reports from police and medics, the next few days of workplace gossip, and several evenings of the good old-fashioned local news, Yuri manages to put together a more or less complete picture of the events.

It's a bright, clear November morning. The last few days have been unseasonably warm. Yesterday, Yuri had shoved his winter coat back in his closet, and this morning, he'd actually shucked off his sweatshirt on his walk from the train. It won't last, Yuri knows. Winter will be here soon enough with its cold winds and colder rains. They don't get that much snow here, maybe one or two big storms a year, but when those hit, the whole city grinds to a halt. More than once, Yuri's had to sleep at the hospital just to make sure he can make it to his shifts on time. Right now, however, snow seems a long way off. Yuri's allowing himself to enjoy the mild fall.

He should have known that something like this was going to happen. If he hadn't spent the last two weeks agonizing over his feelings for Otabek and obsessively running through different imagined scenarios of how their maybe-date at the cat café might play out, he probably could have predicted it. As it turned out, however, Yuri was so mired in his own emotional bullshit that he allowed himself to forget the cardinal rule of the city: _sun's out, guns out_.

It starts with two teenage girls. They're both students at the high school across the street from the hospital. Yuri never learns the original source of their grievances towards each other, but he does know that they choose to settle their differences via a fist fight on the corner in the morning before school. To hear the local news tell it, the altercation had been well-publicized in the school's various social circles beforehand. As a result, a large crowd of other students have already gathered to watch well before the girls even arrive.

It should have been a pointless teenage tussle, ending in a few bruises or maybe a broken nose. Only the much older boyfriend of one of the girls brings a gun.

All of this, Yuri learns after the fact. At the time, all he knows is this:

"I need help here! She's been shot!"

Yuri's halfway through watching Minami sew up a superficial hand laceration in one of the hallway beds when he hears the shout. The hallway beds are right outside the trauma bay, directly across from the ambulance entrance, so Yuri has a clear view as the ambulance bay doors finish sliding open and one of their hospital security guards barrels through. In his arms is a teenage girl, blood-soaked and completely limp.

She's fourteen years old, Yuri learns later, along with the rest of security's story. They'd heard the gunshots as the boyfriend opened fire into the crowd and seen the girl break away from the scattering pack of students, running full tilt towards the hospital. She'd been halfway across the front lawn when she collapsed.

Yuri slams his elbow into the button that opens the trauma bay doors, as Yuuri ushers the security guard through them. Yuri follows at their heels. Behind him, he can hear the dull roar of the emergency department, which up until then had been enjoying a sleepy Monday morning, surging to life. Minami's needle driver and pick-ups clatter to the floor as he abandons his laceration half-sutured to follow Yuri into the bay. Distantly, he can hear Viktor calling for a level I trauma alert.

"There are more coming!" Mickey announces as he and the rest of the team pour into the bay behind Yuri. "Cops just called. At least seven victims, maybe more."

Holy shit, Yuri thinks. They don't have enough staff for this. They don't have enough trauma beds for this. They don't have enough open ORs for this. Especially, if all of them are as bad as this girl clearly is.

At Yuuri's direction, the security guard lays the girl down on the middle trauma stretcher. She's in her school uniform: white blouse, red striped tie, and grey pleated skirt. Her hair is a mass of neat, tiny braids that fan out behind her head on the bed. She's looks small and fragile and very, very still. Yuri feels his heart plummet to the level of his umbilicus. "She was moaning when I picked her up," the guard says. "But she's not doing anything now."

"Does she have a pulse?" Yuri snaps as the team descends on her. Yuuri wraps a tourniquet around her upper arm and feels for a vein. A moment a later, he slides an 18-guage into her right antecubital fossa. Minami, meanwhile, is cutting off her clothing with his trauma shears. At the head of the bed, Sara pulls a laryngoscope and endotracheal tube out of the airway tray in preparation for intubation. Yuri ignores all of them. Instead, he focuses on Guang Hong, standing next to Sara with his fingers on the girl's neck.

Subjectively, it feels like an eternity even though, realistically, it must have been less than five seconds before Guang Hong shakes his head. "I have no pulse at the carotid."

"On the chest!" Yuri snaps, but Mickey is already there. Sara, likewise, already has the bag-valve mask fitted around the girl's mouth, compressing the bag rhythmically to force air into her lungs with each squeeze. "Guang Hong, bilateral needle decompressions then get her intubated. Minami, where are her holes?"

"I see one in the left chest," Minami answers as his shears tear through the last of the girl's clothing. "So far that's it."

"Thoracotomy tray, now!" Yuri shouts. Minami scampers off toward the shelves that line the back of the bay to grab one. A moment later, he turns back towards Yuri, sagging slightly with the unexpected weight of the tray. Yuri gestures for him to set it on one of the small bedside tables.

"No, Yuri," says a voice from behind him. An instant later, Yuri realizes it's Otabek. He's been so caught up in the resuscitation that he didn't even register the trauma team's arrival.

At first, Yuri doesn't understand what Otabek's talking about. _No, what?_ he thinks, frantically, as he turns to face Otabek. Surely, Yuri's either misheard or misunderstood. Otabek can't mean the thoracotomy. "She's the perfect patient!" he exclaims.

It's true. The actual indications for a resuscitative thoracotomy in the emergency department are actually very narrow: isolated penetrating trauma to the chest with witnessed loss of vital signs either in the emergency department or just prior to arrival. The idea is to open the chest in order to relieve any pericardial tamponade, gain direct control of any exsanguinating injury to the great vessels or the heart itself, and to perform internal cardiac massage or defibrillation. Teaching hospitals always play a little loose with the exact indications in the interest of education, however. As a result, Yuri has cracked far more chests that have been strictly indicated by the textbooks. Honestly, this girl might be first chest he opens where it actually _is_ indicated.

Except Otabek, for some reason, is shaking his head. "Not when there are seven more are on the way and maybe even more on top that. I have a finite number of surgeons and ORs, Yuri. I need them for the people I might actually save."

Yuri feels strangely off-balance. His iron grip on this resuscitation is slipping, and it's taking the rest of the world with it. The trauma bay tilts around him as though he's suffered a cerebellar stroke. "We might actually save _her_!" he shouts at Otabek.

Yuri's world keeps spinning, but otherwise, the whole bay is in suspended animation. Yuuri kneels on the floor beside a pile of filled vacutainers, halfway through taping down his IV. Guang Hong has one hand on the patient's chest and the other holding a 14-guage decompression needle. Minami stands frozen, clutching the thoracotomy tray in his hands. The only movement is the rhythmic beat of Mickey's chest compression, punctuated every eight or so seconds by Sara's bagging.

"No," Yuri says. He knows he's shouting, but, to him, his voice sounds like it's coming from miles away. "No, no, she's just a kid. We're trying. _We're trying_." There's a 10-blade scalpel in his hand. Yuri doesn't even remember reaching into his pocket for it. "Open that," he hisses at Minami. When Minami doesn't move, he repeats, " _I said, open that_."

Yuri's vaguely aware that people are calling his name, but they, too, sound distant, and Yuri ignores them. He'll do this himself if he has to. Never mind that he has no way of putting the girl's chest back together once he's opened it. He'll deal with that when the girl has a heartbeat, a pulse, a blood pressure. He'll deal with that when she's _alive_ rather than cold and dead on a gurney in the basement morgue.

Yuri takes a step towards the stretcher and then another one. Mickey is still pumping on the girl's chest. She looks so tiny and fragile. His compressions have probably already broken all of her ribs. Yuri's still clutching the scalpel in his raised right hand. _Fourth intercostal space_ , he reminds himself, _from the sternum to the bed._ He's done this before, but never without back-up.

A hand settles over his wrist. The pressure is gentle, yet firm. "Yuri, no," Otabek says.

"Fuck you," Yuri spits at him. He yanks his arm wildly, heedless of the unprotected sharp in his hand. Otabek doesn't let go.

"Yuri." This time it's Viktor speaking. "Call it."

" _No_."

"Or I will," says Viktor.

That's it, then. Yuri can't argue with that. Viktor is his attending. His word is the last one. Viktor may be giving Yuri the opportunity to end this resuscitation on his own terms, but everyone here knows that Viktor can pronounce this girl just as easily as Yuri can, and once he does, it's over. No one is going to listen to Yuri over Viktor. Yuri can shout himself hoarse, but if Viktor says the girl is dead, the girl is dead.

There's bile in the back of his throat, and suddenly, the scalpel in Yuri's right hand weighs as much as the rock in the pit of his stomach. He lets his arm fall to his side. Otabek moves his hand from Yuri's wrist to pluck the scalpel from his grasp, sheathing it before Yuri can hurt someone with it in his carelessness.

Yuri catches Sara's eyes and then Mickey's and shakes his head. The meaning is clear. Sara drops her bag-valve mask. Mickey stops his compressions.

"Time of death…" Yuri looks up at the clock and blinks several times. He doesn't understand why the numbers are so blurry. "Seven forty-three."

The trauma bay is silent.

"Yuri," Otabek murmurs into his ear. "It was the right call."

It was. Somewhere, deep down, there's a small, intellectual part of Yuri's brain that knows that. It's basic triage principles. In a mass casualty event, patients in traumatic cardiac arrest are triaged black: dead, no resuscitative efforts. It's in every textbook. It's in every EMS protocol. Yuri knows it as well as he knows the intubating dose of etomidate or the anatomic landmarks for a subclavian line. He knows it. Right now, he just doesn't _care_.

Yuri's unadulterated rage must show in his face, because Otabek flinches from his gaze as surely as if Yuri had physically struck him.

"I hope you sleep well tonight knowing you're the reason she's dead."

Yuri wants to take the words back as soon as they're out of his mouth. The expression on Otabek's face is like nothing Yuri has ever seen before. It lasts for all of a fraction of second before Otabek's mouth hardens into a thin line and the rest of his face goes as blank as it was the day they met. His eyes, though…

His eyes look like they've just watch the last star in the universe burn out.

Shit.

 _Fuck._

An uncharacteristic apology dances on the tip of Yuri's tongue. He didn't mean it. He could _never_ have meant it. He needs Otabek to know that, desperately. He needs Otabek to stop looking at him like Yuri's just snuffed out all the light in his life.

Before he can say anything, however, the trauma bay doors swing open once more, and medics rush in with stretchers bearing two more victims. Otabek says nothing. He just turns away from Yuri and towards the new traumas. Yuri knows he needs to follow him. There's no time right now for grief or for anger. Yuri couldn't save this girl, but maybe he can still save the next. He just has to pull it together.

Yuri allows himself one steadying breath and with it, tries to exhale all the roiling emotions of the last few minutes. He can mourn the girl later. He can apologize to Otabek later. Right now, he has more patients to take care of.

All in all, they get nine victims. Three more, with only minor injuries, are treated down the street at the next nearest hospital about a mile south. Only the first girl is dead on arrival. Two others end up intubated in the surgical ICU with open abdomens and uncertain chances. The rest either do well in the operating room or are discharged home from the emergency department with superficial injuries.

Viktor offers to go with Yuri to break the news to the girl's family. Yuri tells him to go fuck himself. He doesn't want or need to be babied. He'll be attending in a few months. This is his fucking job, and he'd better learn to do it, no matter how badly it sucks. So he sits down in the family room, looks the girl's parents in their eyes, and tells them their daughter is dead.

The father cries the hardest. Huge, thick tears pour down his face and drip off his chin despite furious attempts to wipe them away with the sleeve of his shirt. The mother focuses on the practical details, asking questions that about autopsies and funeral arrangements that Yuri doesn't have the answers to. As an intern, he might have found that strange, even cold. Four years in, he knows people process grief in their own ways. It's the sixteen-year-old sister, however, who asks the question Yuri had been dreading:

"You did everything you could, right?" Yuri lies and says yes. He almost doesn't make it to the bathroom before he throws up.

He takes five minutes to wash his face and chew a stick of gum before he goes to see the next patient. It's already after ten in the morning, and in the time that the entire department was occupied dealing with the traumas, the waiting room has quintupled. A lot of it is bullshit. It's Monday, a day when people have the natural tendency to wake up and decide they'd rather go to the emergency room than to work. Normally, it's the kind of shit that would annoy Yuri. Today, however, it's a welcome distraction.

Yuri throws himself into turning over patients with a single-mindedness that he usually reserves for tricky procedures or complicated resuscitations. The more focus he can put on explaining to patients why they're not getting an emergent MRI for their chronic back pain or providing life-saving work notes for patient with viral upper respiratory infections, the less he has to spare for dwelling on the events of the trauma bay. It's honestly some of the most productive Yuri's ever been. Whenever he feels his mind start to drift back, he simply goes to see another patient.

It's the perfect system with one very obvious flaw: shifts end.

"Get out of here," Mila says when Yuri tries to stay after sign-out to reduce a dislocated shoulder. She shoves his work bag and sweatshirt into his hands forcibly. "You've had a rough day. Go have a drink with Otabek."

 _Otabek_.

Yuri hasn't seen him since he sent the last of the traumas upstairs to the operating room. Their interaction during the six remaining resuscitations had been professional in the worst possible way. Gone was the warmth and easy rapport they had built over the last five months. Their discussions of patient management had been clipped and purely clinical, and Yuri's heart had broken a little each time. He could only imagine how Otabek had felt.

He needs to apologize. God, he needs to apologize.

Apologies, however, Yuri is willing to admit, are not exactly his strong suit. He rehearses at least two dozen on the short walk from the emergency department to the employee exit. By the time, he shoves open the door and steps out into the cooling night air, he's narrowed it down to maybe the top four. Yuri figures that even he can wing it from there. Except…

No one is there waiting for him.

Otabek must be running late, Yuri thinks. They hadn't had any additional traumas today, but that doesn't mean Otabek couldn't have ended up needing to take one of the cases from earlier back to the operating room. It's weird, though. Mila had seen Leo walking out on her way in; that's how she'd known about the shootings in the first place. Leo wouldn't have left if his team had an unstable patient needing the operating room. Otabek wouldn't be operating without his senior resident.

Yuri tells himself he'll ask Otabek when he see him and settles himself on the curb to wait. Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Yuri pulls up his text message threat with Otabek. Did he miss a text perhaps? But, no, the last text is from yesterday, confirming that they were still on for the cat café on Thursday.

 _Hey_ , he types and then deletes it. _You in the OR?_ he tries next but ends up deleting that as well. When did talking to Otabek become so hard? Finally, he types _Where are you?_ Still, he can't bring himself to hit send. Instead, he closes out of the app entirely and shoves his phone into his pocket.

By the thirty minute mark, Yuri is starting to shiver. For all the unseasonable warmth of the day, with the sun now long gone, it's starting to feel like November again. The autumn wind whips through the thin fabric of his scrubs without remorse. Yuri pulls his sweatshirt tighter around his shoulders with frozen fingers.

He waits a full hour before he accepts that Otabek simply isn't coming, or more accurately, that Otabek has already gone and left Yuri behind. It's not anything more than Yuri deserves.

He doesn't cry. He passed the point of crying a long time ago. Instead, all Yuri feels is numb as he pulls himself off the curb and makes his achingly cold way to the station to take the train home alone. He shoves his earbuds in his ears as he walks and turns his music up to deafening, trying to drown out the thoughts swirling around his head.

It doesn't work. He still sees the look on Otabek's face every time he opens his eyes, and the dead girl every time he closes them.

The gin works better. He's unconscious less than two hours after arriving home, passed out in his scrubs on the couch with his face buried in Potya's fur.

Yuri doesn't speak to Otabek the following day. The day after that they exchange short, curt words born of professional necessity in the trauma bay. _Please forgive me_ , Yuri wants to beg, _you're the best thing in my life_ , but it's not the time. Besides, what right does he have to Otabek's forgiveness at this point?

Thursday is the day of their planned excursion to the cat café. Yuri deletes the event off his calendar and spends the day drinking whiskey straight from the bottle instead. It's fine. So what if Yuri's ruined the best thing that's happened to him in years? Yuri's a thirty-year-old grown-ass man, sixth months from being an attending physician.

He can handle it.

(He's not handling. He's not handling it at all.)


	6. chapter six

"This is inappropriate behavior from a senior resident, Dr. Plisetsky," Dr. Feltsman informs him sternly. "And it will not be tolerated."

Yuri knows he's fucked up. He's fucked up big. Attendings only address residents as _doctor_ when they are standing in a pile of shit shoulder-deep. It's the medical equivalent of a mother using her child's first _and_ middle name. It means that what Yuri really should do – what Yuri really _needs_ to do – is to shut the fuck up and start apologizing right fucking now. There is a small, rational part of his brain that recognizes that. The rest of him, however, doesn't give a fuck.

"Me?" Yuri snaps against all better judgement. "Minami's the one that almost put a fucking central line in that woman's carotid!" He catches himself gesturing wildly in the direction of said patient's room and forces himself to stop. He wants to exude cool defiance here, not look as borderline hysterical as he feels. He crosses his arms in front of himself, then changes his mind and plants them on his hips instead.

"Language, Yuri," Dr. Feltsman spits on what was probably reflex. He's been shouting that at Yuri for three and a half years now. Then he pauses and takes what Yuri assumes was intended to be a calming breath. It doesn't stop his left eye from twitching. "An intern made a _mistake_ ," he continues through clenched teeth. "You are here to help them improve, not to shout obscenities at them until they cry."

"Then grow a thicker skin," Yuri mutters, because apparently, if he's going to be standing at the bottom of this hole he's dug for himself, why not do it wielding a shovel?

Dr. Feltsman's tone is cold, hard, and brokers no quarter. "You will apologize to Minami, Dr. Plisetsky, or you will find a formal reprimand in your file."

Yuri finally does the smart thing and nods.

His next shift is even worse. He screams at Yuuri when he asks for help getting an IV in a dialysis patient until Viktor drags him bodily out of the department and into the locker room. A medical student scampers out half-changed after catching one look at the expression on Viktor's face.

"You are being unprofessional and borderline insubordinate," Viktor tells him. Viktor's voice is soft, but it contains a venom, toxic as any elapid, that Yuri's heard only once before. That was the day a patient denied Dilaudid threatened to "see" Mila after her shift. Yuri's certainly never had it directed at him before.

Viktor isn't done. "Keep it up, and I will send you home," he adds.

The threat is enough to convince Yuri to bite back is retort about how rich Viktor calling anyone unprofessional is. Yuri doesn't actually _want_ to get sent home. Getting sent home would mean that Mila or Georgi or one of his other co-residents would end up getting called in to cover for him. Yuri may be an asshole, but he's not so much of an asshole that he would make people work for him on their day off. Okay, he'd probably be willing to do that to JJ, if that didn't also mean giving JJ the satisfaction of knowing exactly how deeply Yuri had fucked up.

So Yuri holds his tongue and nods and goes back to work.

As awful as work has become, however, Yuri prefers it to being at home. At home, he's alone with his thoughts with no steady flow of new patients to keep him distracted. He can't even close his eyes without the events of that day playing back unbidden behind his eyelids. Over and over, he sees the girl on the stretcher, feels the weight of the scalpel in his hand, and relives the horrible moment when he'd waved Mickey off her chest. He hears himself say _you're the reason she's dead_ , sees the look on Otabek's face, and feels his heart break all over again.

He sleeps with enough alcohol, but even then he dreams. The dreams are worse, because, sometimes, in the dreams, he goes through with it. He opens the girl's chest, closes the hole in her heart, and coaxes it back to life. He saves her, and then, he has to wake up and remember that he didn't. He has to remember that, no, she's still dead when he had the power to save her.

People keep asking him if he's okay. Mila and Georgi, Guang Hong and Mickey, even Leo have asked. Yuri keeps lying and saying that he is. If he's honest with himself, he doesn't fully understand why he's not. He's been a doctor for three and a half years now. Tack on four years of medical school before that, and he's not exactly naïve to the whole experience of death. This girl is far, far from the first patient that Yuri's lost. She's not even the first child he's lost.

In the past, Yuri has always been able to swallow the anguish and move on. It's an important trait in a doctor, especially in an emergency physician. The psychiatrists will say it's not healthy, but they don't work in an emergency department where there's no time to be falling apart over every little thing, when the next critical patient is always right there is the waiting room.

Maybe, it's just that this is the first patient Yuri's lost that he really thought he could have saved. Honestly, a majority of the deaths in his emergency department are elderly patient with end-stage illnesses or patients that arrived to him too late for him to make an actual difference. Yuri can't work miracles. If someone's been pulseless for over an hour, all the epinephrine is the world is not going to bring them back, especially not in any meaningful way.

Maybe, it's that on top of everything else, he's also missing Otabek. It's selfish, Yuri knows, especially when somewhere out there a family is burying its child, but he can't help it. He misses Otabek fiercely.

Maybe, it's the combination. After all, he's become used to having Otabek there to decompress with, to help him through the difficult cases. It had been Otabek who'd talked him down after that non-accidental trauma case two months ago and helped him through a dozen or more smaller cases both before and after. He's been spoiled, he realizes, by Otabek's presence, and now that it's gone, Yuri can't remember how he used to cope without it.

A week to the day later, Yuri wakes up on his couch, still drunk with an empty bottle of vodka in his lap. He can't remember if he was crying when he passed out, but he is now. It's those big, deep, hysterical sobs. They've pulled him from sleep and now threaten to choke him. He can't breathe. He can't even think. He fishes around blindly for his phone, finally finding it on the floor next to the couch. It's three twenty-four in the morning his lock screen informs him. Yuri has to be at work at seven. He unlocks his phone and is immediately greeted by his mistake of earlier that evening.

He'd Googled the girl's obituary.

Yuri can feel the anguish boiling inside of him once again. On his phone's screen, the girl smiles out at him from what is clearly a school yearbook picture, bright and full of life. All Yuri can see, though, is her limp, lifeless body on the trauma bay stretcher. He closes out of Chrome, able to bear it no longer, and opens his contacts list, unthinkingly. He supposes he meant to call Mila, which is strange, because he knows she's working tonight. It's not until someone picks up that he realizes he hasn't.

Otabek answers on the first ring.

"Yuri?"

Yuri can't respond. He's too overwhelmed form the combined surprise and relief of hearing Otabek's voice.

"Yuri?" Otabek repeats. "Yuri, is everything alright?"

Yuri tries to say _yes_. He tries to say that he meant to call Mila and that he's sorry for bothering Otabek in the middle of the night. Instead, he whispers, "No."

From the other end of the line, comes the sound of fabric rustling, and then: "Where are you? Are you at home?"

Yuri nods before realizing Otabek can't see him. "Yes," he finally rasps.

Something metallic jingles, and then Yuri hears the distant but distinct sound of a door opening and closing. "I'll be there in five," Otabek says and hangs up.

Three and half minutes later Yuri opens his apartment door to insistent knocking. He can imagine what he must look like. His eyes feel swollen and puffy, and when he rubs at his face, he can feel the dried tear-tracks on his cheeks. Half of his hair is still pulled back in the ponytail he always wears at work, while the rest hangs wildly around his face. He's still in his dirty scrubs.

Otabek doesn't comment. For a moment, in fact, he does nothing at all. Then, suddenly, his arms are around Yuri, drawing Yuri to him in a crushing embrace. Yuri tenses reflexively at the sudden contact, but it lasts only an instant, before he slumps against Otabek, resting his head on Otabek's shoulder. Fresh tears are prickling at his eyes, and Yuri sniffles once, twice, and then the first renewed sob escapes him. "I keep seeing her face," he chokes out around the tears.

Yuri doesn't remember much after that. He has a vague awareness of gentle, murmured words, the meaning of which he never quite grasps, if indeed there was ever any to be found. Mostly, however, he remembers warm, strong arms and a scent that, until this moment, Yuri had never realized was Otabek, because he'd been associating it with home.

"You must think I'm pathetic," Yuri says almost an hour later, when he can finally speak in full sentences again. At some point, Otabek must have navigated him back to the couch, because that's where they're sitting now. At least Otabek is sitting. Yuri is lying curled halfway into Otabek's lap with his head on the other man's chest. Otabek's arms are still around him, and one of his hands is buried in the mess that is Yuri's hair, rubbing soothing circles against his scalp.

"Why?" Otabek asks. His voice are low and deep, and Yuri can feel the word rumble in his chest. "For being upset? You're human, Yuri. You're allowed to have feelings. You do know that, right?"

Yuri scrubs uselessly at his face, futilely attempting to wipe away the worst of the tear-streaks. "I should be able to handle shit like this," he insists.

Otabek shakes his head, and Yuri can feel it against the top of his head. "That doesn't mean it has to be easy. It doesn't mean it _should_ be easy."

"You're handling it."

The hand in Yuri's hair stills. "Am I?" Otabek asks. "Why do you think I was awake at three in the morning?"

Oh.

Yuri wasn't expecting that. Otabek was always so stoic. More than that, he's spent the last five months being so unfailingly supportive of Yuri, always ready with the exact right words of comfort, that Yuri had never for an instant doubted that that meant Otabek must have a rock-solid handle on his own shit. Looking back, Yuri can't help but wonder exactly how self-centered he's been.

"This is your fault, you know," Yuri says without thinking. Otabek stiffens beneath him. Only then, does Yuri realize how poorly chosen his words were, especially when, _fuck_ , Yuri _still_ hasn't apologized for what he said in the bay.

"No, wait, that's not what I meant," he says, scrambling to sit upright. He's suddenly desperate to be able to look Otabek in the eyes, subconsciously hopeful that his expression might communicate what his words are spectacularly failing to. "I meant—" Yuri stops and rubs his hands once again over his face. He knows what he wants to say, or at least, what he wants to convey. Finding the words, however, is more difficult, and Yuri can't afford to fuck this up. Not again.

He takes a moment to collect himself. He needs to do this right, to _say_ this right. In the meantime, Otabek doesn't tell Yuri to go fuck himself, which Yuri chooses to take as encouragement.

"What I meant was," Yuri starts again, and for all his need to look at Otabek a moment ago, Yuri suddenly finds he can't meet his eyes. He stares instead at his own hands, clasped in his lap. "For three years, I was _fine_. Not great, maybe, but fine, you know? I did my thing. I dealt with my shit. Not always in the best ways, but I did it.

"Then you came along with your stupid comfort and your stupid kindness and your stupid _always knowing what to say_ , and you made everything, I don't know, _better_. Then when you weren't there, I couldn't remember how I used to do this without you."

He looks up when Otabek presses the pads of two fingers under his chin. "I'm sorry, Yuri. I'm so sorry. I should have been there for you."

Yuri gapes openly at him. This is wrong. This is backwards. It's supposed to be Yuri apologizing to Otabek, not the other way around. _Yuri_ is the selfish prick here, not Otabek.

He shakes his head in a vain attempt to clear the confusion. "You're sorry? _I'm_ sorry. After what I said to you? I didn't deserve to have you there. I don't deserve to have you here now. God, Otabek, I am so, so sorry. If I could takes those words back I would."

The expression on Otabek's face is soft and infinitely gentle. "I never blamed you, Yuri," he says. "You were upset. You lashed out. I knew you didn't mean it."

"But you—" Yuri starts and then stops again. _But you left me behind_ , he wants to say, but at the same time, Yuri realizes how pathetic that sounds. God, he's the worst. He can't even apologize to Otabek without making it all about himself.

Otabek seems to understand him anyway. "I thought you were angry with me. I thought you didn't _want_ me around. I thought you might—" Yuri's never heard Otabek's voice break before, but it does now. "I thought you might hate me," he finishes, "for not saving her."

Yuri reels. He doesn't understand what's happening here. Otabek is supposed to hate _him_. The idea that it could ever be the other way around would be laughable, if the thought of Otabek believing that didn't make Yuri want to cry instead.

"I could never," Yuri whispers.

"I'm glad," says Otabek. There's a hint of a smile forming on his lips, and it makes something in Yuri's chest clench. Then, as if he's reading Yuri's mind, Otabek adds, "I could never hate you either."

"But I hurt you," Yuri says. "You can't tell me I didn't, Otabek. I know I did. I saw your face."

"You did," Otabek agrees. The two fingers still lingering on Yuri's jaw move to tuck the tangled strands of Yuri's hair behind his ear. "But I forgive you."

"Why?" It doesn't make sense. Yuri doesn't deserve this. He's never deserved any of this, never deserved anyone like Otabek in his life.

Otabek lets his hand fall from Yuri's hair. It lands on Yuri's own hands, still clasped in his lap. Gently, Otabek unfolds Yuri's fingers from each other and intertwines them with his own. Yuri stares at them, marveling in the contrast: Yuri's pale, thin fingers laced with Otabek's thicker, darker ones. It looks right, Yuri thinks. It _feels_ right.

Otabek's reply comes slowly. Yuri can practically hear each word being weighed before being spoken. "I think for a lot of the reasons you just said."

Yuri looks up, eyebrows furrowed in confusion, but Otabek isn't done.

"Do you know worst part of the last week has been for me? Worse than reliving you pronouncing that girl every night when I'm trying to sleep? Worse than second guessing my call and thinking that maybe you were right and I could have saved her?"

Otabek pauses, and it takes a moment before Yuri realizes he's waiting for Yuri to respond. He shakes his head, and Otabek continues. "It was thinking that I'd lost you. It was thinking that we'd never have _this_ again." He squeezes Yuri's hands. "I don't need to tell you how badly this job sucks a lot of the time. You know that. I know you know that. It's like you said, we learn to deal with it in our own ways, and I did. I've been coping for years, but, Yuri, I—" Otabek swallows hard. "I was never really _happy_. Not until I met you.

"You make me happy, Yuri."

Yuri's head spins with some unnamed emotion. He's overwhelmed, dizzy with it. He wants to both laugh and cry at the exact same time. He wants to hold Otabek and never let him go. He wants to tell Otabek that he feels exactly the same. He wants to tell him he feels even _more_ , only he doesn't have the words.

He settles for leaning forward, until his forehead is pressed once again against Otabek's shoulder, his face hidden against the upper part of Otabek's chest. "You make me happy, too," Yuri whispers.

They say no more after that. Otabek lets go of Yuri's hands to bring his arms up and around Yuri, pulling further against him. Yuri allows himself to relax against Otabek's chest. He can feel Otabek's heartbeat against his cheek, steady and sure and lulling him towards sleep. Yuri's exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but still he resists the inviting pull of slumber. Instead, he drifts on the edge of consciousness, dozing lightly before blinking himself back awake. He's afraid that if he does sleep, he'll awake to find Otabek gone and that all of this was nothing more than a dream. Yuri doesn't think he can bear that.

At ten after five, the morning alarm on Otabek's phone goes off, yanking Yuri out of his comfortable, fuzzy half-sleep. Yuri knows it means Otabek needs to leave, to return to his own apartment to start getting ready for his shift. He feels Otabek shift around him, reaching for his phone and silencing the alarm. Otherwise, however, Otabek makes no move to get up. Instead, he sinks back into the couch, still holding Yuri loosely against him as silence envelopes the apartment once more.

Yuri fights the urge to drift off once again. As much as he wants to stay cocooned against Otabek indefinitely, Yuri has no desire to make him late for work. Besides, Yuri will need to start getting ready for his own shift soon.

Yuri allows himself another five minutes of bliss, before he detangles himself from Otabek and drags himself to his feet. Wordlessly, he offers his hand to Otabek to pull him up in turn. Otabek takes it. Neither of them let go. Yuri's reminded of that first night in Mari's bar, when Otabek had taken his hand after asking Yuri for his friendship. He recalls the strange comfort he'd felt at Otabek's touch then, the odd reluctance to let go.

There's nothing strange or odd about it now. Now, it feels as natural to Yuri as breathing.

They walk to Yuri's door hand in hand. Yuri flips the deadbolt he doesn't remember locking and opens the door. Otabek steps through. In the doorway, he pauses and turns to face Yuri once again. "I meant it," he says, his voice low and intense. "You make me happy, Yuri."

Yuri gives him a shaky smile. "I meant it, too," he says.

For a moment, it seems like Otabek's about to say something more. He opens his mouth slightly, before closing it again with a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. Then, he squeezes Yuri's hand once before dropping it. Yuri feels the loss of a contact like a punch in the diaphragm.

"Wait," he tries to say, but nothing comes out. Otabek is already turning away. Yuri reaches out frantically, his hand landing on Otabek's shoulder. Otabek pauses and looks back at Yuri, and Yuri kisses him.

It's a chaste kiss, comparatively, but nothing that could be mistaken for a friendly one. Yuri presses his lips firmly against Otabek's, catching Otabek's bottom lip between his own. Neither of them have time to move before Yuri is pulling back. It's been less than a second, but already he's overwhelmed.

He feels lightning-struck as every emotion of the last week – no, of the last five months – courses through him at once. All the pain and anger and grief, all the joy and comfort and something else Yuri can't or won't put a name to. It surges through him, but instead of leaving him a seared, hollowed-out husk, it leaves Yuri feeling more alive than he's felt in days, months, _years_.

For a moment, he and Otabek just stare at each other. Otabek's eyes are wide, and for an agonizing moment, Yuri worries that he's misread all of this. He's just opened his mouth to apologize when Otabek's hands come up to cradle his face.

This time, it's Otabek who kisses him. The kiss is soft and gentle and oh-so-sweet. Yuri kisses back desperately, his hands coming up to fist in the front of Otabek's t-shirt, holding on for dear life as his emotions threaten to sweep him away.

Their second kiss lasts longer than the first, but they still break apart too soon as far as Yuri's concerned. Neither of them, however, go far. They remain standing with their foreheads resting together. Their breath mingles in the bare millimeters that separate their lips. The air between them is thick with what has just transpired and crackling with implications for the future. There's so much Yuri wants to say and even more that he's afraid to say, but he holds his tongue, unwilling to ruin this perfect moment.

They stand there, holding each other, for what feels like simultaneously forever and no time at all, until finally Otabek says, "I have to go." Yuri nods against him. Otabek runs one hand through the mess that is Yuri's hair, before taking a step back. The added inches feel like a chasm. Yuri wants nothing more than to wrap himself back into Otabek's arms.

"I'll drive you home tonight." It's a statement, but something in Otabek's tone makes it sound like a question.

Yuri smiles. "Yeah," he says. His voice is raspy from a combination of crying and disuse. "Yeah, sounds good."

Two and a half hours later, he shuffles into the emergency department. He's showered, brushed his hair, and changed his scrubs, but there's no hiding the puffiness to his eyes or the dark circles that mar the skin beneath them.

"You look like shit," Mila announces the moment she lays eyes on him.

Yuri almost laughs. He's looked in a mirror, so he knows she's not wrong. The irony, of course, is that today is the first time in the last week he doesn't actually _feel_ like shit. Today is the first time in the last week he can remember what happy feels like.


	7. chapter seven

Yuri's surprised to find that, honestly, things don't change much over the next few weeks. Otabek still drives him home from work on the days when their schedules align. He still pours Yuri a drink when Yuri's had a shit day. He still listens indulgently while Yuri rants about the latest injustice that Viktor has inflicted upon him. Of course, now, the rides home come with goodbye kisses, and the alcohol on bad days is supplemented by Otabek's arms around him, and sometimes when Yuri rants too long, Otabek kisses him into silence against the couch and there's not much in the way of talking again for several hours.

The thrust of their relationship, however, that easy companionship they've built up over the last few months, remains entirely unchanged.

"That's because you were already basically dating," Mila explains to him in the tone of voice one might use to explain the concept of serial troponins to a particularly dim medical student. "Literally everyone knew that but you two."

Occasionally, they do manage to go on actual dates. Otabek takes him out to dinner on the first night off that they both share. Afterwards, they see some ridiculous science fiction movie, because Otabek is nothing if not a huge fucking nerd who named his fucking guinea pig Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yuri takes great pains to remind Otabek of this vocally and repeatedly as they leave the theatre. Otabek just smiles fondly at him in response until Yuri resorts to throwing popcorn at his head just to get a rise out of him. Otabek retaliates by pulling Yuri close and kissing the butter off his lips.

Yuri gets his revenge by finally – _finally!_ – dragging Otabek to the Kawaii Kitty Café. Otabek spends most of the visit sitting in the corner, stoically sipping his hot chocolate, while Yuri bounces around the room. He flits manically from cat to cat, cooing at the "good kitty-kitties", and taking an objectively embarrassing number of selfies. There's a fat, orange blob named Professor Pizza, a matriarchal calico named Fanny Pack, and an overly energetic kitten named Whoopsie, and Yuri loves them all. However, it's a grumpy tortoiseshell called Spaghetti who ultimately wins his heart. Otabek has to haul him bodily from the building to prevent Yuri from taking her home.

"Think of Potya," he reminds Yuri as he drags him down the street by his wrist. They're halfway down the block when Yuri manages to twist free and bolt back towards the café. He's two steps from the doors when Otabek catches up with him. Yuri laughs brightly as Otabek tackles him from behind, delighting in the feel of Otabek's arms around him even as he attempts to squirm away and back into the café. They must look ridiculous to passers-by, Yuri knows, but he can't bring himself to care.

The first weekend of December, Yuri goes with Otabek as his date to his sister's wedding. Neither of them can get much time off, so they end up flying in late the day before. The ceremony itself is nice enough, he supposes. Yuri finds it hard to get too moved by the marriage of two people he's only just met. They seem happy, though, and Yuri is not so much of an asshole that he can't be happy for them.

The reception, however, is an awkward affair. Otabek's sister herself actually seems quite sweet. She greets Yuri with a smile and a kiss on the cheek. "Beka won't stop talking about you," she tells him. Yuri can feel his face flame at that, and when he glances over at Otabek, he spies a faint dusting of red across his cheeks as well. Otabek's parents, on the other hand, make no attempt to disguise the fact that, as far as they're concerned, Yuri is very much the wrong gender to be considered an appropriate match for their only son. Their cold greeting is followed by a flurry of snide comments whenever Yuri and Otabek are just not _quite_ out of hearing distance. He and Otabek only last an hour before they escape to the hotel lobby, twin bottles of stolen champagne hidden beneath their suit jackets.

"They did know you're not straight, right?" Yuri slurs half a bottle of champagne later. They're currently sitting on the floor in the lobby corner, backs against the wall and legs sprawled in front of them. Ties are loosened and shirts unbuttoned, and their suit jackets have long since been discarded. "Tell me you did not just bring me to your family-wide coming out."

Otabek laughs easily at that. The alcohol has loosened his usually restrained demeanor. He's actually drunker than Yuri's ever seen him. His eyes are bright with it, and his hair is adopting a slightly disheveled look, curling away from where it was once gelled into place after Otabek has run nervous fingers through it one too many times.

"They know I'm bisexual, in the sense that I've _told_ them I'm bisexual," Otabek replies. "I think they just…" He shrugs and takes another sip of the champagne. "I think they like to ignore it, like it will just go away if they do. Or maybe they just thought that when I eventually settled down, it would be with a woman."

 _Settled down_.

Long after their conversation has moved on, Yuri still can't shake those two words. They rattle around dangerously inside his skull, overturning unexamined questions as they do.

They haven't talked, not _really_ , about where this is going. Yuri knows it's not casual, not for him and not for Otabek. They'd made that much clear that first night. As far as future plans go, though, they've never really been discussed. It's still early, of course. The overtly romantic aspect of their relationship is not even a month old at this point, and, on top of that, they've been taking things slow, loath to disrupt the precious dynamic that they've already built between them.

The issue, however, is this: Yuri will be graduating in a few months. Before that he needs to find a job, and, to be honest, he hasn't exactly planned to go looking anywhere nearby. Ever since his grandfather's heart attack intern year, Yuri's ultimate goal has been to move back near him after residency was finished. His grandfather's recovery has been everything Yuri could have hoped. Still, there's no reason why he couldn't benefit from an extra set of hands around the house, and Yuri would like to be nearby in case anything happens again.

Being closer to his grandfather, however, means being four hours from Otabek.

As far as Yuri's concerned, the choice is clear. He _likes_ Otabek. He doesn't want to give him up, but his grandfather is his only family and the most important person in Yuri's life, and he _needs_ Yuri closer. In the end, it's not really a choice at all.

Yuri, naturally, has no idea how to bring any of this up to Otabek. Discussing emotions in ways that don't involve shouting has never been one of Yuri's strong suits. So, he doesn't. Instead, he just goes on applying for jobs as though getting an offer won't mean jeopardizing the best things that's happened to him in the last, oh say, _thirty fucking years_.

Try as Yuri might, though, they can't avoid the subject forever. Eventually, invariably, it was always going to come up, and one night in mid-December it finally does.

It's after dinner at Yuri's apartment, where they've both just enjoyed a rare, home-cooked meal. At least it was home-cooked in the sense that Yuri boiled the pasta and then poured the jar of supermarket-brand marinara sauce over it all by himself. It's more than either of them usually manage and pretty much at the limits of Yuri's culinary ability anyway, so as far as Yuri's concerned, it totally counts. He even managed not to set the garlic bread on fire this time.

Otabek is tucked into one corner of Yuri's couch, flipping through the latest issue of _JAMA_ far too quickly for Yuri to believe he's actually absorbing any of the articles. Yuri, in turn, has sprawled across the remaining the length of the couch with his head pillowed in Otabek's lap. He has his Tintinalli's textbook propped open against one of his thighs and has been staring at the last page for the better part of an hour, futilely willing his eyes to keep reading.

Reaching the end of the journal, Otabek closes it and tosses it back onto the end table beside him. There it joins the last several months' worth of issues that Yuri keeps swearing he's going to get to one day. "Are you off on Friday?" he asks rhetorically, because he knows Yuri is. "We should do something."

Shit.

Yuri knew the question would be coming. He and Otabek rarely pass up the opportunity to spend their days off together. Yet, it still manages to catch him off guard. He's not prepared for this conversation. He needs more time, he thinks, to fortify his emotional bulwarks before broaching this subject with Otabek. Briefly, he considers telling Otabek that he's going to visit his grandfather. It's not lie, not exactly, but certainly a half-truth, and Yuri can't bring himself to do it. Otabek deserves better than to be willfully misled.

"I have a job interview, actually," Yuri replies eventually in as neutral a tone as he can muster. He stares resolutely ahead, suddenly finding himself newly fascinated by the management of herpes keratitis.

Otabek gives a surprised little exhalation. "Oh," he says. "Where?"

It's an innocuous enough question, but Yuri can hear the emotions that simmer just beneath the surface, twin currents of hope and apprehension twining through Otabek's words. Yuri can't tell which causes his heart to ache more.

"It's, um," Yuri pauses when he hears his voice waver. He sucks in one steadying breath before continuing, "It's a place near my grandfather's house." He squeezes his eyes shut as he finishes speaking as though that will block out what's coming next, because now, Otabek _knows_. He knows that, come June, Yuri's almost certainly going to be moving four hours away, and now that he knows, it's entirely reasonable that he might think it best to just end this thing between them now, before either of them can fall any further.

This is why he hadn't wanted to talk about it, and, yes, he knows he's being wholly and completely unfair, both to himself and to Otabek. He just isn't ready to lose this. He isn't ready to lose _Otabek_. Yuri, stupidly, _desperately_ , wants to prolong what they have as long as possible, no matter how selfish that makes him.

For a long moment, Otabek doesn't reply. The implications of what Yuri's just said hang heavy in the silence of the apartment. It's suffocating, and Yuri's struck by an overwhelming need to flee. Only, he doesn't know where to, not when the one person he wants to be running towards is currently threading gentle fingers into his hair and whispering, "Yuri, we need to talk."

Yuri shatters. "Please, no," he whispers, eyes still screwed resolutely shut. "Not tonight. _Please_. I can't lose you right now."

Otabek doesn't listen. Yuri can feel him shifting under him. A moment later, Tintinalli's is being tugged out of his hands. Yuri lets it go without a fight. He hears a muffled thud as the textbook is deposited on the carpeted floor. Then, Otabek is pushing him upright and gently turning Yuri around so that they're facing each other on the couch.

A hand strokes along Yuri's jaw. "Hey," says Otabek. "Open your eyes. Look at me."

Yuri can't. He just _can't_. He shakes his head defiantly, pulling away from Otabek's fingers. He's acting like a child who lacks object permanence: close your eyes and it will go away. Right now, however, it's the only defense Yuri has.

Even with his eyes closed, however, he can still feel Otabek's gaze on him. The weight of it is like a physical presence against him, bearing down upon the hunch of his shoulders, and Yuri wilts beneath it. It's bending him, bending him inexorably, and it won't be long before he breaks. He was a fool to think something so precious to him would ever end in anything but tears. He takes a shuttering breath and steels himself against Otabek's next words.

"You're not going to lose me, Yuri. Not unless that's what you want."

Yuri's eyes do fly open at that, shock and disbelief accomplishing what a simple request had been unable to. "Of course I don't want that!" he says furiously. The idea is ridiculous. It's absurd. "Why would you ever think I'd want that?"

Otabek gives a single-shoulder shrug. "Well, you do seem to be planning to move four hours away without telling me." The tone of his voice is light. The look in his eyes, however, carries a heaviness that weighs on Yuri's heart.

"Not because I want to!" Yuri cries. "You _know_ how my grandfather's health has been. Someone needs to be close to him, and I'm all he has."

"I know," Otabek says softly. He reaches out once again, brushing knuckle along the arch of Yuri's cheek. This time, Yuri doesn't shake him off. "I get that. I'd actually figured you'd probably want to. What I don't get is why you won't talk to me about it."

Yuri looks down at his hands. "I was afraid," he admits quietly. "I was afraid you'd think it'd be better just to break it off now. I'm not ready to lose this, Otabek. To lose _us_."

Otabek's hand stills against his cheek. "What if I told you I don't want to break it off?" Otabek says, low and intense. "Not now. Not ever."

Yuri blinks, once, twice, as Otabek's words sink in. Something beneath his sternum constricts tightly and then pops, and, suddenly, Yuri's breathing easier than he has all night. He's not sure what to call the emotion inflating in his chest, but if he had to choose, he'd probably guess _hope_.

He looks back up at Otabek. "Four hours is a long commute," he says hesitantly.

"Which is why we need to talk about it," Otabek responds. "How else am I going to find out whether this place where you're interviewing is a trauma center?"

Yuri hears the words, but they can't possibly mean what he thinks Otabek is saying. _I'm having a stroke_ , he thinks stupidly. It's a ridiculous thought, but, as far as Yuri's concerned, it's less ridiculous than the idea of Otabek offering to uproot his entire life for the second time in as many years just to stay with Yuri.

"Why?" he demands. "Why would you do that for me?" It comes out more accusing than Yuri intends, but Yuri's too overwhelmed right now to care.

"Because I'm in love with you."

Otabek says it simply, matter of fact, like it's the most basic and obvious thing in the universe. He says it like he hasn't just shattered Yuri's entire world into a million tiny pieces and then reassembled it brighter and clearer and _better_ than ever before. Everything is suddenly, strangely _sharper_ now. It's as though Yuri's perception has been honed to a fine point with Otabek's words at the tip. It's like tunnel vision, except the opposite, because instead of feeling like he's going to pass out, Yuri feels like he's just woken up.

" _What?_ " Yuri breathes involuntarily.

Otabek's smile is almost sheepish, but he's clearly undeterred. He reaches out and takes Yuri's hands in his. "I love you, Yuri," he repeats, and the effect is the same. Yuri is going to have a hell of time of it if he always feels like the sun and moon and all the stars have re-aligned in the sky every time Otabek says those three words.

It'd be worth it, though. Oh, god, it would be worth it.

He's kissing Otabek before he even realizes he's moved. The kiss is deep and open-mouthed and fizzing with the intensity of the emotions behind it. His arms are wrapped around Otabek's neck. Otabek's, in turn, come up to encircle Yuri's back, pulling him in closer, until Yuri's halfway into Otabek's lap. All he can think is that he needs _more_ : more heat, more skin, more friction.

Yuri rips off his scrub top, cursing the fraction of a second he's required to unseal his lips from Otabek's and wishing wildly he still had his trauma shears on him so he could have just cut the damn thing off instead. He tugs Otabek's undershirt out of his jeans and slides his fingers beneath it to glide along his abs then upwards towards the hard planes of his chest. Otabek moans into his mouth as he does so, and it's the second best sound Yuri's heard tonight.

Yuri's hands retreat momentarily to tug at the hems of Otabek's shirts, desperate to remove them as well. "Wait. Yuri, wait," Otabek murmurs against his mouth. Yuri complies instantaneously. Otabek pulls back, only slightly but far enough to leave Yuri feeling bereft. Otabek's eyes are dark with pupils blown wide, and his face is flushed.

"Bedroom," Otabek says, and yeah, okay, Yuri can agree with that. They both scramble to their feet and stagger their way through Yuri's bedroom door. Then, Otabek's lips are on Yuri's once again, and he's being pressed backwards towards his bed, and Yuri knows it's going to be a very long time before his brain starts functioning again.

"Stay," Yuri whispers later, the words muffled against Otabek's chest as they lie curled together on Yuri's bed. It's a ridiculous request. They both have work in the morning.

Otabek, however, just tightens his arms around him. "Always," he says.

At first, Yuri doesn't know what to make of the feeling that sweeps through him. It starts at the top of his head where Otabek's breaths are warm puffs against his hair and travels all the way through to the tips of his toes where they're curled between Otabek's calves. It's a tingling exhilaration that, in its wake, leaves an overpowering sense of contentment and peace. The contrast is bizarre and wholly unlike anything Yuri has ever experienced before. He doesn't have a word for it.

Except, Yuri realizes slowly and astonishingly, he actually _does_ have a word for it. It's just that it's a word he's never used in this context before. It's a word he's never used before for anyone other than his grandfather. The realization thrills him as much as it terrifies him.

"Otabek?" he says.

"Yeah?"

"I love you, too."

The answer is _yes_. The hospital where Yuri's interviewing is, in fact, a trauma center. He and Otabek both have job offers there before the month is out. They sign the contracts together after work one morning the first week of January. Yuri makes fun of Otabek's perfect flowing script. Otabek, in turn, teases Yuri for his illegible scrawl.

It doesn't take long for the rumor of Otabek's departure at the end of the academic year to start making the rounds of the hospital like some particularly contagious strain of MRSA. The emergency department as a whole seems to take on the perspective that this is arguably the sweetest thing that has ever happened to one of their residents. Viktor redoubles his offers of wedding planning assistance, and Georgi won't stop waxing poetic about the power of love. Mila, however, is somehow the worst, alternating between flowery sighs and crude hand gestures whenever Yuri and Otabek are within fifty feet of each other. Yuri doesn't know how he makes it through some shifts without manslaughter charges at minimum.

The department of surgery, it seems, is of the opposite opinion. Leo keeps teasing Yuri about "seducing away our new attending", which invariably causes Yuri to go red, much to his general annoyance. Not that Leo really cares that much. He's graduating in June same as Yuri. Some of the surgical attendings, though, have taken it less in stride. At least twice, Yuri's caught Seung Gil staring thunderclouds at him from across the cafeteria. At least, Yuri thinks he has. Given that Seung Gil's resting expression is not exactly warm snuggles, it's possible that Yuri's imagining it. He is, however, very definitely _not_ imagining it when Dr. Baranovskaya, the chair of surgery, gives him a vaguely menacing head-to-toe in the elevator one morning before exiting with a clipped: "I hope you're happy with yourself."

The thing is, though, that Yuri is. He really, really is. He's stupidly happy in way that he's not sure he can ever recall being in the past and definitely had never fathomed being in the future. Some days, it's hard for him to believe.

Over the next several months, he and Otabek begin the curious task of integrating their lives. Yuri's already met Otabek's family, for whatever that was worth, so one rare free weekend, he brings Otabek home to meet his grandfather. The pair of them end up getting on obnoxiously well, talking for hours about old science fiction shows that Yuri's never heard of until he starts to feel vaguely excluded. His frantic attempts at keeping up with the conversation by Googling things like _Doctor Who_ and _Quantum Leap_ on his phone are all for naught. Yuri ends up even more confused than he had been before.

He and Otabek also make careful introductions between Potya and Obi-Wan, which actually goes better than either of them had dared to hope. Potya turns out to be too old and too lazy to really take an interest in Obi-Wan, no matter how objectively delicious he probably is. Obi-Wan, for his part, doesn't seem to care what sort of menacing predators might be wandering around as long as there is also someone present willing to feed him a carrot.

Their apartment hunt ends in a building about a mile and a half from Yuri's grandfather's house. It's close enough that Yuri, or Otabek, can easily drop in to help out, but not so close that his grandfather feels smothered. He's already started complaining about Yuri mothering him. It's also an easy motorcycle ride from the hospital, though Yuri ends up buying a car as well for the days when their schedules fail to align. They move most of their shit the third week of May when Otabek has some vacation scheduled anyway.

Otabek attends Yuri's residency graduation the last week of June, ducking in the back after it's already started. He'd asked Leo to hold his pager, he tells Yuri later, and Leo had teased him mercilessly for it. Yuri thanks him in the stupid and unnecessary graduation speeches that the program makes all the graduating fourth-years give. He means to keep it cursory and professional. He ends up crying instead. Mila and Georgi nearly vibrate into the stratosphere with delight.

They start at their new hospital together on the night of July the third. Yuri has to admit that it's weird and more than a little terrifying being the attending now. For all he'd been chafing under supervision these last few months, he finds himself missing the safety net. Now, it's all on him, with no Viktor or Chris or Dr. Feltsman there to catch him if he fucks up.

"We don't graduate people who aren't ready," Dr. Feltsman had told him their last shift together. Yuri tries to keep those words in the front of his mind.

It's just after two-thirty in the morning when the emergency department gets the notice to expect an incoming trauma patient. It's a motor vehicle collision with ejection from the vehicle and alcohol on board.

"Do we know anything about this new trauma surgeon on tonight?" he hears one of the nurses ask his senior resident as they get up and head towards the trauma bay. The resident shakes his head.

Yuri just grins.


	8. epilogue

It's another year and a half before both written and oral board exams are done, and Yuri can finally, officially call himself a board-certified emergency physician. Otabek starts planning their celebration in advance, several weeks before the final board scores are released. Yuri greets this with some trepidation.

"This is going to look really stupid when we find out I failed," Yuri whines at him one morning as Otabek tries to pin down a night for the festivities that actually fits into both of their schedules.

"Relax," Otabek reassures him, with a soft smile and a squeeze of Yuri's hand. "I'm sure you did fine. Doesn't your program have a hundred percent pass rate anyway?"

Yuri makes a wordless sound of distress, because while that is, in fact, historically true, Yuri's fairly certain none of his program's previous residents ever had to deal with idiot boyfriends that don't understand simple concepts like _jinxing things_.

Otabek ignores Yuri's impression of strangled seal. "Besides," he continues, "the place I have in mind requires reservations a couple weeks ahead of time anyway."

Three weeks later, Yuri understands why. The restaurant is fancy to the point where, even in his nicest jeans and a button-down shirt, Yuri still feels underdressed. Fortunately, the maître d' doesn't comment. Instead, she just smiles and leads them to a corner table next to the restaurant's wide, high front windows. The night has turned biting as the relentless winds of a cold front moves through, and the sidewalk beyond the windows is unusually empty for this time of night.

Inside the restaurant, however, is warm and cozy, filled with soft lighting and live music and an only mildly over-attentive wait-staff. The food is delicious, and the portions, surprisingly enough, aren't even too artistically small. Otabek insists on ordering some needlessly expensive bottle of wine, which suddenly doesn't seem all that needless when the first sip touches Yuri's tongue.

Objectively, everything about the dinner is lovely, which is why Yuri finds it so strange that, subjectively, something feels very off. Otabek is quiet, even by his standards, and all of Yuri's attempts to open a dialogue are met with one- or two-word conversation-killing replies. The bulk of the dinner is spent eating in silence. Well, at least Yuri eats. Otabek barely picks at his food. He does drink most of the wine though, and Yuri mentally notes that he should probably be the one who drives them home.

"Are you even listening?" Yuri asks, when yet another of his attempts at conversation dies somewhere between them on the table. Not that discussion of his grandfather's recent medications adjustments is anywhere near thrilling. Yuri acknowledges that. Otabek, however, usually at least manages to make concerned noises in all the right places. Tonight, he's not even doing that.

Otabek has the grace to look sheepish. "I'm sorry, Yuri. I'm just distracted."

Distracted.

Right.

This is stupid. It's rapidly becoming clear that Otabek has absolutely no interest at all in being here, which makes no sense at all to Yuri. Otabek had been the one to insist upon this place to celebrate. Yuri would have been happy watching Netflix in their pajamas, curled up together with Potya and Obi-Wan on their laps. He never needed a fancy dinner or expensive wine. He just needed Otabek, and right now, he doesn't even really have that.

He makes it through appetizers and the main course before he cracks. "Let's just go," Yuri says quietly, setting the desert menu back down on the table. The crème brûlée he'd been eyeing wasn't worth an additional twenty minutes of Otabek's painful disinterest.

For a moment, it seems like Otabek's about to argue, and Yuri almost wishes he would. At least it would mean that Otabek is actually acknowledging Yuri. Otabek, however, doesn't protest. He merely motions for the check, gathers their coats, and leads them out onto the sidewalk.

Yuri follows, a chill settling into his heart that has nothing to do with the cold November winds. He's assembling puzzle pieces in his head, and he doesn't like the picture he's building. Otabek's distance tonight is not exactly unprecedented. He's been acting strange for weeks now. It was mostly little things that Yuri had blown off at the time and only now, in retrospect, are beginning to seem significant. There've been phone conversations that end as soon as Yuri walks in the room, and he's noticed Otabek texting frantically with unknown parties. Yuri's not at all someone who goes snooping through other people's phones, but when he picked up Otabek's to check the time last week, he couldn't help but notice that Otabek had switched out the password that Yuri knew as well as his own for a fingerprint scan. Otabek is too good of a person for Yuri to think for an instant he would cheat on him, but the prospect that maybe Otabek has fallen out of love with him and is looking for a way to leave their relationship is starting to seem uncomfortably likely.

There's a gust of frigid air, and Yuri tells himself that the tears he blinks back are from the cold.

Otabek, unfathomably, wants to go for a walk in some dumb park afterwards. "Are you insane?" Yuri demands. For one thing, it's twenty degree out and the whipping winds of the cold front are intent on driving the chills into every corner of Yuri's body. For another: "You could barely stand to be at the same dinner table with me, and now you want to _go for a stroll_?"

"Please, Yuri," Otabek sounds choked and strangely desperate. He reaches for Yuri's hand. Yuri yanks it away, and Otabek looks like he's been knifed in the gut.

"You go," he snaps. "I'll wait in the car." He turns away from Otabek then, stomping along the empty sidewalk back towards where they'd parked their car. He passes under a streetlight, and the sickly yellow light flickers and then extinguishes. Yuri tries not to see it as an omen.

"Please, Yura," Otabek begs to his back. "I don't want to fight."

"Then what do you want?" Yuri shouts, whirling back around, because, right now, if the answer is _someone else_ , he'd rather just hear it.

"I want to marry you!"

For a long moment, the only sounds are the howl of the wind and the crunching tires of cars speeding down the street beside them.

"What?" Yuri breathes.

Otabek scrubs gloved hands over his face before pushing them back through his hair. "I want to marry you," he repeats. He sighs and shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. He looks almost _small_ , Yuri thinks bizarrely as he stares at Otabek standing in the middle of the sidewalk. It's something in the way he holds himself, shoulders hunched against the wind, or maybe Yuri's response; Yuri can't tell. "That's why I've been so weird all night," Otabek adds. "I was trying to work up the courage to propose."

"Oh," says Yuri, because he knows he needs to say something, but it's the only sound his brain is coming up with. He feels detached, like this can't possibly be happening or maybe like he's watching this happen to someone else.

It's not completely unexpected. They had discussed things like marriage and children a handful of times in the past. Those discussions, however, had been largely in abstract, confirming to each other that those were things they both wanted one day. Otabek had dropped no hints that he was planning to bring any part of that abstraction into reality anytime soon. Suddenly, Yuri finds Otabek's behavior over the last few weeks cast in a new light. All those calls and texts, the changes to his phone lock…

"How long have you been planning this?"

Otabek shrugs. His hands are still buried in his pockets, and it makes him look like a caught child. "A couple weeks?" he offers.

That's what finally sets Yuri's world spinning, because this is real and this is happening. Otabek's spent the last weeks designing some stupidly intricate proposal, because Otabek _wants to marry him_. Yuri laughs, a short burst of hysterics, partly because of the ridiculousness of the situation and partly because he feels like if he doesn't, the emotions welling inside him are going to cause him to choke or explode or maybe just float away. He feels like a bottle of champagne that someone just shook. At the same time, he feels like he just drank the entire bottle of said champagne. He's dizzy and giddy and fizzy with joy.

Another laugh bubbles out of him. "So?" he says to Otabek. Otabek's brow furrows, but he doesn't respond. Yuri rolls his eyes and makes a vague gesture with his hand that he hopes conveys something in between exasperation and the general desire for Otabek to _just get on with it_. "Are you going to ask me to marry you or not?"

"I— Did you want me to?" Otabek straightens just a little bit, but Yuri's never heard him sound so unsure. "You seemed really pissed at me just then."

Yuri snorts. "Yeah, because I thought you were breaking up with me."

Otabek's face falls in horror. "Shit. Yuri, I'm sorry," he says. He's moving before Yuri has a chance to respond, striding towards Yuri on the sidewalk until he's close enough to touch. So, Yuri does. He reaches out and covers Otabek's lips with his fingers, stopping any further apology before Otabek can start. A moment later, he replaces his fingers with his lips.

"Just ask me, Beka," he whispers against Otabek's mouth. "The answer's yes."

He can feel Otabek's sharp intact of breath against his lips. "Really?"

Yuri nods. An instant later Otabek has pulled away, and Yuri panics for a second before he realizes what's happening. Otabek is down on one knee with Yuri's hands clasped in his own. It's ridiculous. They're still on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. It's freezing, and Otabek's knee has to be ice where it's resting against the concrete. It's ridiculous, but Yuri doesn't care, because it's also perfect.

Otabek looks up at him, eyes dark and deep and swimming with unshed tears. "Yuri Plisetsky, will you marry me?" He looks stupidly happy and stupidly hopeful, and Yuri loves him completely.

So, he says, " _Yes_."


End file.
